To have the kind of year you want to have something has to happen that you can't explain why it happened. Something has to happen that you can't coach.

If you pray enough for things I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling the darker blinder strata of character are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making and directly perceive how events happen and how work is actually done.

Gentleness doesn't get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.

And what I saw happening is that women don't make one decision to leave the workforce. They makes lots of little decisions really far in advance that kind of inevitably lead them there.

Some men have a silly theory about beautiful women - that somewhere along the line they'll turn into a monster. That movie gave them a chance to watch it happen.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Women are the real reason we get up every day. I'm talking about real men. If there were no women I would not even have to bathe because why would I care? These are guys I'm hanging with. I wake up for a woman every day of my life to make it happen for her.

Just as everybody has the vote including women I think children should because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.

You must learn day by day year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love the more you are interested in the more you enjoy the more you are indignant about the more you have left when anything happens.

I got my first big paycheck for 'My Best Friend's Wedding.' This was in the days when you actually did get paid to have a supporting role. It just doesn't happen like that anymore but this was in the '90s. It was the golden age!

It happened in Miami in Coral Gables a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession a war of independence no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

After every major conflict - World War I World War II Korea Vietnam the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Bad things do happen in the world like war natural disasters disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

War is what happens when language fails.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war.

I'm finding myself really angry over spending and the deficit. I'm finding myself really angry over what's happening in the Middle East the decision to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. I'm angry about cap and trade. And I've been on record for a long time on the failed war on drugs.

When war comes two things happen - profits go way way up and all perishables go way way down. There becomes a market for them.

All this happened more or less. The war parts anyway are pretty much true.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today if only we had eyes to see them.

Think of what happened after 9/11 the minute before there was any assessment there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq and so the war drums beat.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.