Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.
I do not believe that the top rate should be lowered for individuals who are making more than $1 million a year. I don't think there's any need to eliminate the estate tax.
Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.
The real estate lobby has prominent allies in both parties. After the last major overhaul of the tax code, in 1986 - under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, a Republican Senate and a Democratic House - it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed legislation that restored lost real estate tax breaks seven years later.
In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.
He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem.
He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.
Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people - and he won't do very well in advertising.
As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.
I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking.
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.
We should get to the business of providing at least one million opportunities each year for young Americans to spend a service year with peers who are different from them - by race, ethnicity, income, politics and religious belief.
I should not have to prove my ethnicity to anyone. I know who I am.
I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
The Malays, like the Japanese, have a most rigid epistolary etiquette and set forms for letter writing. Letters must consist of six parts and are so highly elaborate that the scribes who indite them are almost looked upon as litterateurs.
