Russell Baker writes columns as a poet writes light verse - with tongue in cheek and a steady hand.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Actually SOON has more than the Left Behind series, but I really believe less is more.
Sometimes, if you aren't sure about something, you have to just jump off the bridge and grow wings on your way down.
The more interesting the 9-to-5 work is, the more it takes away from my real work, which is writing.
A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.
As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless - and absolutely essential.
As he was telling us about these pleasures, at that very moment, in the ruin and the tall grass, I stepped on a hornets, nest and got stung.
As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.
That gentleman will call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think they're scared of him. They're merely professional killers; he's in advertising!
A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
You're certain to get a decision in a trial.
This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.
This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.
There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.
There's also a bit of family echo in the character of Harriet. Harriet is kind of a recurring state of mind in my mother's side of the family.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
It's astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body. Some of the brightest women I know are just obsessed with that search. It's very sad.
It's a challenge to take a character and make sure he ages correctly and make sure he looks like he would look if he were to get a year older.
It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
It's like a candy store for an illustrator, I connected with Harry pretty quickly and loved the way J.K. described everything; she's such a visually thinking person. You can't pass that up.
It's creepy, knowing someone might be watching me. Why do they need that?
It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.
No longer is there a quest for the truth so much as there is this apparent need to present both sides of an issue even if one is nothing but lies and distortions.
No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
The U.S. is by far the biggest exporter of arms in the world. It was true during the Clinton administration, and it's true during the Bush administration. It's bipartisan.
I was 37 years old. I wanted to support myself by writing.
Once I started to write prose, I certainly did not envy the poets. I've mocked poets and poetry ever since I began writing fiction.
At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner.
I'm glad I'm successful at it, because it's allowed me to live very well financially, and give my kids a lot of things. It's enabled me to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do. But it's not who I am.
I'm trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.
In my earliest childhood, we seemed to move back and forth between New York City and Connecticut until I was about eight or ten years old.
I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.
I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.
If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
I haven't always done things this way. It's the nature of the two books. They have been so consuming that I end up living inside them.
I'm not terrifically comfortable with even thinking about what I've accomplished in relation to who I am and how I relate to other people.
I'm concerned about a lot of serious border issues. This book is about the border reality and the struggles of the undocumented worker.
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.
If you're going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it.
In the last decade, Peter Duesberg has been one of those who have continued to raise questions about the drug hypothesis seriously.
In rooting around for something to grab onto, I latched onto the past and people in the past who I felt were strong, actively ethical characters.
I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.
I just got a letter from a guy in Japan. One of them somehow found out where I lived one day and came up to my house and knocked on my door.
In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.
In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.
In policing science, I favor applying the norms of science, which require scientists to answer criticisms of their works openly and publicly.
I quickly discovered that I wrote best when I had an audience to read out loud to soon after the completion of my latest, hottest pages.
I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals.
But if all these things were the bits of tinsel and straw I made my nest out of, the way I felt while I worked was strangely different.
But I love to travel with my partner, reading, sitting in the garden, smoking dope, and going to movies. Not necessarily in that order.
I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.
I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.
Because of my father's dislocated life, I knew intuitively that I wanted to have as few jobs as possible by the time I was married.
He took pride in belonging to the world's most exclusive club: the United States Senate.
Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.
All change is not growth; all movement is not forward.
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
You don't have these perfectly transparent, simple thoughts. You have thoughts that are all cluttered up, like overused bookshelves.
The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.
A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
The earliest memory in Connecticut that I can think of has to do with a riding stable that abutted against the property of my grandfather.
The first edition was 100,000 copies, a huge economic risk for the publisher. I was quite proud of the fact that the book was not banned or censored.
Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.
An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.