Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

Career is too pompous a word. It was a job, and I have always felt privileged to be paid for doing what I love doing.

The mayor of Newark, N.J. wants to set up a citywide program to improve residents' health. The health care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark.

I like 'The Office.' I particularly like the British version with Ricky Gervais. Of course, I liked the 'Seinfeld' show a lot. I thought that was an awfully good show.

You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.

God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

A strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist.

Hillary Clinton is such a formidable candidate.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

A digging fork is a stout, short-handled tool with four flat tines about a foot long.... for weeding I use it delicately to nudge the soil loose from roots without breaking them.