I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

Nobody’s ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

Imagination rules the world.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Russia isn’t going to start a war. They can’t afford it. I think Mr. Putin can be dealt with if we stop screaming at him. You can work with the guy. You just have to know who he is.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

The more you know the less you need to say.

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.