True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

A legacy is not what is recorded in history books or repeated in song, but what is woven into the souls of those who remain.(from The General's Legacy)

Life isn't about wasting. its to live!

If Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it act like a normal country.

Though he should conquer a thousand men in the battlefield a thousand times, yet he, indeed, who would conquer himself is the noblest victor.

Be able to laugh at difficulties.

Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.

New York is nice, but I don't like it as much as I used to.

You're not going to get anything politically correct out of me.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.