It is typical, in America, that a person's hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.
If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.
I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.
I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
I look most like myself. . . when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.
Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling.
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
[Running for President is] physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually the most demanding single undertaking I can envisage unless it's World War III
For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.