Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

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.

You must be the most beautiful and sophisticated thief I have ever met. Secretly you stole my heart without my knowledge.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot.

We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown.

Work harder than your opponent.

You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open, and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point

Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.

I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

When I make a joke, nobody gets injured... when Congress makes a joke, it's the law.