"I desire to leave to the men that come after me a remembrance of me in good works."

“I know I'm old-fashioned, but there's just something about the act of looking at books versus taking in information on a screen, which is so one-dimensional. There's a sense of ownership that you have with books, a physical connection.”

“Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.”

“The story of America is necessarily one of progress because if it's not than it's a stale story where we have not risen above Klansmen.”

Source : "We Love America, and You Should, Too". Interview with James West, Ben Dreyfuss, www.motherjones.com. July 3, 2015.

“Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality,”

Source : Robert McKee (2010). “Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting”, p.12, Harper Collins

“Like there's actually a need for Greenland. You can get ice at 7-Eleven.”

Source : Steve Kluger (2009). “My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park”, p.83, Penguin

“I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.”

“The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape”

Source : Alice James (1934). “Her Brothers Her Journal”

“The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”