I offered him $1,000. He just laughed.

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.