I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Whatever final judgment awaits ‚Bush v. Gore‘ in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain public confidence at a level never beyond repair.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

I am not a fan of books.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

My mother insisted that her children read.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

The proper study of mankind is books.