A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They’re not just ipso facto and just go on and on.
While I’m working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
You have the right to speak your mind.
I don’t read other writers because I’m writing all the time. It’s too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together.
There’s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
God is a creator, not a law giver.
I can’t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics – this is very selfish of me, but who cares – what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.
Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.
Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively – don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions.
Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives.
The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place.
Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist – as one will invariably discover – resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place.
What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers – there are only questions.
If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?
Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.
Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God – this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.