While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

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.

"Okay I have arthritis and this is the way arthritis is." Take pain as it comes and you can better master it.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

I don't even think twice about wearing a swimsuit because it's always been a part of my lifestyle.

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.

If we agree on everything, only one of us is necessary.

Boxing is just show business with blood.

You always hear people saying, 'I hope I'm not turning into my dad', but I'd be honoured if I became half as decent a bloke as he is.

Violence among boys is so valorized and so encouraged that you have to do things different in violence prevention with boys than with girls.

I tried the plan of talking incessantly myself, so as to hide the fact I didn't hear anything they said, the result was nobody paid the slightest attention to my (doubtless brilliant) remarks.