In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.
Hypocrites in the Church? Yes, and in the lodge and at the home. Don't hunt through the Church for a hypocrite. Go home and look in the mirror. Hypocrites? Yes. See that you make the number one less.
Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
There's an air of mystery around the Masons, but the reality is that they're mostly a bunch of veterans getting drunk in a lodge that they've built to look like a temple. It's just a bunch of guys trying to get away from their wives.
I don't want to participate in traditional Indian religious ceremonies - dance in a sun dance or pray in a sweat lodge or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. The power of these ceremonies has an appeal, but I'm content with what little religion I already have.
An Indian's dress of deer skins, which is wet a hundred times upon his back, dries soft; and his lodge also, which stands in the rains, and even through the severity of winter, is taken down as soft and as clean as when it was first put up.
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.
In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I've grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends.
I just sold a farm in Missouri, and I own a ski lodge in Colorado with some Honolulu partners.