He said, "Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.

The Church is not called to overthrow government but to influence culture.

The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn't know I would love motherhood as much as I do.

What we do is inherently self-centered and sort of narcissistic. It's hard to really be thinking about myself all of the time when I have a dog who needs me to be caring for him twenty-four seven.

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

I don't work, I live... I don't have a job, I just have a life.

God is going to reveal to us things He never revealed before if we put our hands in His.

The more complex the problems of the Nation become, the greater is the need for more and more advanced instruction.

The charity that is a trifle to us can be precious to others.

Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.