The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I wrote a novel for my degree and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God not from government.

John wrote with a very deep love for the human race and a concern for its future.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them but as I wrote my own I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have and take for granted: hot showers enough food friends routines.

When I wrote 'Fast Food My Way' in 2004 I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now more people cook from that book than any other I've written in the past 30 years.