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" I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. "

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" Nonfiction is never going to die. "

" I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for. "

" The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. "

" I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them. "

" There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. "

Beautiful Woman

" The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity. "

" I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that. "

" Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has. "

" Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around. "

" 'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug? "

" On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe. "

" To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about. "

" A cult is a religion with no political power. "

" The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. "

" Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. "

" Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness. "

" Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed. "

" I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods. "

" We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history. "

" People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. "

" I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them. "

" It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved. "

" Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed. "

" In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public. "

" It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination. "

" Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page. "

" In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific. "

" No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech. "

" This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave. "

" There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone. "