Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.

Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly.

Being a professional screenwriter is perhaps the hardest occupation. Because nothing is ever yours and, by the nature of the medium, you are never ultimately responsible for your work. It can be interesting - if you have another outlet.

Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.

Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.

Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.

Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.

I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I'm skeptical.

I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.

I got 'The Red White and Blue' out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.

I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.

I love cops; I'm fascinated by the criminal justice system.

I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

Life is much more available in New York - there are a dozen movie theaters within walking distance. Living in California is easier, but you get sedentary.

Most anyplace one lives is essentially dangerous. There are floods in the Midwest, and tornadoes. There are hurricanes along the Gulf. In New York, you get mugged.

No professional athlete likes to admit that he has played too long. There is too much money involved, rarely enough saved, and there is the eternal hope that age has not withered skills.

The myth of the Kennedys - and the hold - was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.

There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.

There was no pretense to objectivity; 'Time' had a partisan Republican point of view, and if it was one not shared by many of its gentrified Ivy Leaguers, few felt the compulsion to quit.

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

What the world does not need is another script or television writer.

You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.

Conspiracy is a small but durable seller retooled every year or so.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities “ in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

I believe that if a man does a job as well as a woman, he should be paid as much.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

You really should not do this job unless you're willing to put in that enormous amount of effort. You should not do the job unless you're willing to take risks. And you shouldn't do the job unless you're willing to lose the job, too.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

Even if I don't have a job, I work on plays and scenes.

In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.

People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.

I always saw being in a band a full time job.

Promoting job creation and economic growth in the Hudson Valley is one of my top priorities in Congress.

A politician will do anything to keep his job - even become a patriot.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.