But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.
Years
It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?
We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word ‘damn’ about them?
The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years’ War.
I was what? – twelve years old – and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.
Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.
Many years, I would publish four books – an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy.