“I love research – that’s all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That’s a serious flaw in my writing process – shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.”

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy.

It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others.

I should like to elbow aside the established pieties and raise my martini glass in salute to the mortal arts of pleasure.

Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

Concern yourself more with accepting responsibility than with assigning blame.

To bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn … seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime.

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.

Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.