Journalism allows its readers to witness history fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

To my great surprise, I never heard anyone cry out in the disorder, even though they suffered in great agony. They died in silence, with no grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All for the country!

The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

Learning starts with failure the first failure is the beginning of education.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

My two major faults are that I row too long and pick up too many women

Events are less important than our responses to them.