Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.
Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.
I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
Protecting people from the truth is another way of shutting them out.
It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.
I should probably confess that I get bored easily, which explains my reluctance to work with formula, tropes, whatever.
I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.
Smiles were rare in this house. Smiles had to be bought and paid for.
Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.
There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.
There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.
You have to really want to be a Navy SEAL. The passion you need to endure the rigors of training, to become the best of the best... It's admirable.
Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession.
There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.
