My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I wanted to be a part of the Disney history.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

What a year to live in! Worth all other times ever known in our history or any other.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

Out of Coltrane's whole history, there are things which I think are great from all the periods.

I got a call to come in and meet Fox, and the rest is history.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.