Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.