Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!