“A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories . . . the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.”

“Popular music creates most impact in the telling of stories.”

“Young men list music as their focus and means of identity -- before sport, before TV, before cinema -- while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second.”

“The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."Tone?'The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened.”

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”

“That's how we women deal with stuff. We spit it all out, kind of like a hairball, and then we clean up the mess and move on.”