...friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships. - John Irving

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

"When people die, Vargas - I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life - they never really go away," Pepe told the young doctor.

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominance of our culture — for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime — and of all holy-seeming innocents — that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.