I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn't have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn't listen to operas, nor do...
On becoming a mother, I sort of feel like every kid is my kid. I really do get that sense in a much more profound way that we all are a global community and we all have to band to try and give the children of our this generation whatever tools we can...
The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless const...
Notoriously outspoken, his sentences always punctuated with profanities, General George S. Patton was the epitome of what a leader should be like - or so he thought. Patton believed a leader should look and act tough, so he cultivated his image and h...
Pause, breathe, and lift, undefined, what is possible. Let the feeling of celebration come upon you, even if you do not comprehend cerebral reasons to justify it. For from that center, it will generate its own, able to carry you, until the original o...
The fracking revolution kicks off two additional mini-revolutions in energy: the accelerated shift to natural gas-powered vehicles, reducing the oil demand even further, and the displacement of coal in electricity generation frees up the cleanest and...
Writers choose to drink because of their inability to cope with the daily hassles of being part of a society. Why shouldn’t they? Every day an intelligent human being is plagued with bills, horrifying news stories and general idiocy that slowly gri...
This generation has lost the true meaning of romance. There are so many songs that disrespect women. You can't treat the woman you love as a piece of meat. You should treat your love like a princess. Give her love songs, something with real meaning. ...
The history written, taught, and sworn to as ‘the unvarnished truth’ by the establishment—any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist—is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithi...
There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous mortal existence and return eve...
What civilization has done to women’s bodies is no different than what it’s done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat; in short, to everything that isn’t supposed to “talk,” and in general to whatever the knowledge-pow...
Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away...
It's one thing to say you think someone "hung the moon" but that generally means you are blind and deluded, and then the relationship fails because they say you changed, when really, they never saw you at all...The real test is if someone sees all yo...
When I was doing 'Generation Kill' in Africa I worked with five really super-trained Navy SEALs who taught us all these moves like how to disarm people: if there's a bar fight and someone's got a chair or there's someone with a gun behind our head, h...
I mean... if you're raised as a decent human being, killing somebody is against every moral thing you've ever been taught. And so, generally, in combat it's 'krauts,' the 'gooks,' the 'yanks' - whatever you want to do to try and make it so that it's ...
Most of [the alchemists] were poor; many all but unknown in their own time, many died and saw no fruit of their labours… Of some the very names are forgotten. But though their names be dead, their works live, and grow and spread over ever fresh gen...
My great-grandfather, Peter O'Hara, was born in Ireland, I believe, in County Clare. His father, my great-great-grandfather, had actually come to America a generation before when times were very bad in Ireland. He worked in the Pennsylvania area and ...
Generally speaking, rural drivers are a much better behaved species than city drivers. I'm not sure whether they're intrinsically this way, or there are just fewer opportunities for them to do behave badly. You can't go around running red lights if t...
I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein, because of his general reputation, because of what I'm convinced he's done with regard to terrorism and the support thereof. But I'm not at all sure I believe that it has...
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speakin...
There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that i...
