And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

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.

Denial. It’s the only thing that keeps most of us from losing our sanity.

Pay it forward with free compliments. They are returned in due time. NetworkEtiquette.net

I wrote newspaper articles professionally for seven years, and I love newspapers.

The Constitution is a 200-year-old parchment, simply because we digitize the words should not suggest their meanings change.

Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.

I don't bring my life into a character at all.

I'm inspired by almost every artist I come across.

Sport, at its best, at its most human, is able to inspire an innocence and joy that is unique to each of us.

Human rights rest on human dignity. The dignity of man is an ideal worth fighting for and worth dying for.