You simply cannot trust or refer to your experience of your self to tell you what you are, to tell you the truth within.
How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" - as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.
Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of National Geographics, is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
Work on the accent, it will enliven the whole.
I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
Fasting will also overcome sexual additions and demonic powers.
The last thing I want my child to see is Dad running around in the middle of the pack. That would really upset me. And that would upset him. I would be embarrassed to take him to school with kids saying, 'Hey, how'd your dad do this weekend?' 'Well, he finished fifth or sixth'.