Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head.

My guess [is] . . . that the great majority of Americans are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment. . . . I think the country has long been ready to restrict the use of guns, except for hunting rifles and shotguns, and now I think we're prepared to get rid of the damned things entirely - the handguns, the semis and the automatics.

There is nothing like a man for bringing out the animal in an animal.

Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are alsopracticed in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death--that is, they attempt suicide--twice as often as men, though men are more "successful" because they use surer weapons, like guns.

A five-year old is in a pretty good position to assess who is beautiful and who is not. Removed from the confusions of sexuality, he or she can judge a face as a face.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.