Words matter. These are the best Thomas Mallon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
I was raised – and still consider myself to be – Catholic, though I’m non-practicing and haven’t fulfilled my Easter duty since sometime during the Nixon years. I’m assailed by all kinds of stimulating doubts, but I do believe in God.
I actually think that ‘Bandbox,’ by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.
The late Tom Wicker’s biography of Nixon, called ‘One of Us,’ is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn’t expected to feel.
Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.
With ‘Fellow Travelers,’ I think I was consciously trying to imagine what my own life as a gay man might have been like if I’d been born exactly 20 years earlier.
The green appeal of solar sailing – traveling by light, once chemical propellants have done their dirty job of orbital insertion – ought to be powerful.
Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.
I’ve always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.
American secretaries of state have typically been more buttoned up than bon vivant, but John Quincy Adams’s diplomatic successes – bigger than anything presidential or legislative that he achieved – still surprise a student of his personality.
I like writing dialog but don’t think I’d be much good at a screenplay. I once had to write a treatment for a novel of mine – a condition of its being optioned by a movie producer – and I turned out something pretty lackluster. So my inclination would be to stay out of the way of an experienced screenwriter.
I think that the worst form of naivete can be extreme cynicism. If you think that nobody comes to Washington to do any good whatsoever, that is almost as bad as being starry-eyed and thinking that they are all here to advance democracy.
Bobby Kennedy’s conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president.
One’s politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.
The Czech Republic, severed from its old Slovak half, sits in apparent landlocked contentment, inside the European Union but outside the troubled Euro Zone, set into the new Continental mosaic like one of the small sturdy paving stones, just a few inches square, that form the sidewalks under the visitor’s ambling feet.
