The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

Born to a tribal Bedouin family of nomadic desert shepherds in the region of Tripoli, Gaddafi was profoundly anti-colonialist. It is affirmed that his paternal grandfather died fighting against the Italian invaders when Libya was invaded by them in 1911.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I always have to be writing.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‚bads‘ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‚bad‘ white males. Only, when you write about ‚bad‘ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‚good‘ blacks, ‚good‘ homosexuals and ‚good‘ women?

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

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.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.