If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Writing is a job: you must show up.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Even during the worst hardships, when the other things in our lives seem to fall apart, we can still find peace in the eternal love of God.

The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.

Young men who have been away, been to war, they are different when they come home.