Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.

I think one thing writers can do is point out that you don't have to say openly racist things, like [Donald] Trump, to be a racist or a xenophobe.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about "welfare mothers" - a code phrase for people of colour.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

Writing is a lonely act. When two writers come together to write a horror story it can be crazy. You can't step on a mine and hope it doesn't explode.

God’s will is that we would be righteous in our living. God is holy, and the whole scheme of redemption has holiness for its goal.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

When I went to school, they told me literature was a rope I must use to climb out of the dark well of unknowing. Writers are the knots on the rope.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.

When I entered the sport of boxing I wanted to be one of the best and be undefeated. And I was able to attain that, not just one championship title, but four.

If this were a [Hollywood] studio film, I wouldn't have pushed my father into a table, I would have beat him up. My father wouldn't have kissed my girlfriend; he would have raped her.

When the first list was being drawn up in the rock and roll book of Genesis, it would have been: In the beginning, God created Pink Floyd.