Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

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.

Hitting "like" on a social media platform is the modern day version of clapping at the end of a performance.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

I stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.

We're in an historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

I have no regrets in my life. If not for the mistakes that I made I would not be the man I am today.

Alzheimer's ... it is a barren disease, as empty and lifeless as a desert. It is a thief of hearts and souls and memories.

I don't love everything I do, and I don't always like how I am in it. I'm not always pleased.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.