I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Let's pray for grace to live heavenly on earth.

If everyone followed the rules, we wouldn't be human...And I'd choose that than being a Robot over any day.

America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.

I don't believe in writer's block.

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

I think my career will be remembered for what it was and what it is, and I don't need more than that.

A good painting has to do about 12 things at once.

Arkansas is a state where politics is retail.

Structuralism argues that a liberal capitalist world economy tends to preserve or actually increase inequalities between developed and less developed economies.

Why, in our age of science, [do] we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition?