Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as karmic reassignment) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of and .

Christopher Hitchens

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

Joyce Maynard

We are but tenants and shortly the great landlord will give us notice that our lease has expired.

Joseph Jefferson

Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.

Haneef Fatmi

The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Robert A. Heinlein, on censorshi

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.

Jarvis Cocker

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.

Source Unknown

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

Most of an award-show host's job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it's the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel's 'Hero Dog Awards.'

Rob Sheffield

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Joy is but the sign that creative emotion is fulfilling its purpose.

Charles Du Bos, What Is Literatu

For me art and chess are closely related, both are forms in which the self finds beauty and expression.

Vladimir Kramnik