Writer Quotes

I am deeply devoted to the 27,000 songs I can take anywhere on my iPod Classic as well as the exquisitely engineered MacBook Air on which I typed this column.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.

Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

Certainly there are worse sins than doing everything possible to make your presidency matter.

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.

Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda.

As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.

As a parent and a citizen, I'll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs's example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much...) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.

Americans have always evinced some distrust of government, but the current situation has exacerbated this to a degree that may be unprecedented.

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be.

America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Fox News is nothing if not impressive. No matter how harsh the criticism it endures, the network somehow always manages to prove itself even worse than we had previously imagined.

Microsoft has a monopoly over the desktop operating systems.

Bill, The United States is not a company. It is a country.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don't you think?