Honestly, my character doesn't have much in common with Harry Potter besides the fact that he's an unlikely hero who's thrown into a huge situation.
As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.
You know, we live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we come very, you know, cost-conscious.
We are squandering our wealth in many respects, to the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we're also going to squander our freedom.
The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.
Each year terrorist attacks kill far fewer Americans than do auto accidents, drug overdoses, or even lightning strikes. Yet in the allocation of government resources, preventing terrorist attacks takes precedence over preventing all three of the others combined. Why is that?
Memorial Day orators will say that a G. I. 's life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U. S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
I eat meat because meat tastes like murder, and murder tastes pretty dam good!
To an American writer, I should think it must be a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the newspapers.
It's only game. Why you have to be mad?
Never forget the essence of your spark!