Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing..

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture….

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young..

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care..

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to sh….

The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in ….

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy t….

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter..

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who's in charge. If the young man's in charge ….

Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins..

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey..

Much more than memoir; it's history..

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War..

Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is….

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyho….

I'm seventy-six now. I'm at a stage in my life where I feel a lot of affection and regard for women, and I felt the need to make this clear in some w….

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check..

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely..

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and….

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know..

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer..