We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.
Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.
The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens.
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
Sometimes when I'm really enjoying a book, I'll read a sentence or paragraph and just think - how can someone's head be wired in such a way that they'd come up with that?
Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.