I felt sick with hatred then for my own people. If you had asked me why I hated them, I might have said that I hated them for being so loud and for being so drunk. But now I believe I hated them for suddenly being my people, not just other people. In...
The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dog...
Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and...
In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the Neo-Con-Artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defence, three times more for gasoline and home-heating oil...
Television Commentator: Your name, please. Clayton Townley: Clayton Townley, local businessman. Television Commentator: Are you, sir, a spokesman for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan? Clayton Townley: I told you, I'm a businessman. I'm also a Mi...
Mr. Dawes Jr: In 1773, an official of this bank unwisely loaned a large sum of money to finance a shipment of tea to the American colonies. Do you know what happened? George W. Banks: Yes, sir. Yes, I think I do. As the ship lay anchored in Boston Ha...
The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tel...
Good Samaritans: Truth, justice and the American way–for them it wasn't only a comic book code; it was a way of life. it was admirable, courageous, and inconvenient as shit. -Stefan, CHIMERA
Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.
Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.
The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.
It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
He [Iggy] started reaching for things around the table, and his hand landed on Total. “You’re black.” “I prefer canine-American,” said Total.
All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.
Locals. They’ll eventually get out. They’re annoyed. Like when Americans go to the lake. And it’s closed. ‘Cause some kid pooped in the water.
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world.
Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?
A blanket could be used to stop terrorism. Unless that terrorist has a small knife, or really sharp teeth, and is able to chew through the cloth separating him from our American freedom.
