I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
The relationship between press and politician - protected by the Constitution and designed to be happily adversarial - becomes sour, raw and confrontational.
At Kansas City, Kansas, before the saloons were closed, they were getting ready to build an addition to the jail. Now the doors swing idly on the hinges and there is nobody to lock in the jails.
I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.
The only luck I had in my life was when I married you. I knew it wouldn't last because I was too happy. I knew they would not let me be happy.
What's really hit me over the years is that you go to every race and see all the well-wishers, and you really feel like you are connected with people after all these years.
The way I relax is I think, 'I haven't got anything coming up.' I like to know there are months ahead when I've got nothing.
Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.
One of my favorite things - and I am sure everybody else's in this Chamber - is to give away money. You really don't get much opposition when you give away money.
I do not want our children and grandchildren to live in a world where everyday they fear some regional strongman with weapons of mass destruction. We need to send a message to these future would-be bullies: you will not be allowed to threaten the world.
Of course there may well be particular reasons why Spencer rather than others is dead, as there were also particular reasons why he rather than others made such a stir.
It's heartbreaking but we're trying to get over it. As disappointed as we were, I think that somehow you have to find a way to think that it happened for a reason.
I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.
Now, I'm not suggesting we're going to wait 40 years or even four years, but I think we have to put in perspective the fact that we've come quite a distance. We have quite a distance to come - go, as well.
I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.
Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!
Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations.
Now, I don't know how they judge all that, but if anybody in the world deserves to be in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Ritchie Valens does.
That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.