Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn’t declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we’ve been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the...

Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Never have children, only grand children.

As dumb as this administration is, they don’t look ahead. They don’t know where any countries are. They don’t know how to make deals. They don’t really know much about anything. There is no plan.””

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity –...

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Rome… at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of...

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people...

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

It makes no difference whom you vote for — the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can’t always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor...

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also...

In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

The ownership of this country has usually been pretty shrewd. They knew what they wanted. They don’t want to pay taxes, certainly. They don’t want people blowing them up in the night like 9/11. And...

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America, painfully brief.

By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied...

Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.

We’re not a democracy.

Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories – fag and straight.

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often...

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

This is not at all bad, except as prose.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the...

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private morals ‘¦controlling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins … with whom and how...

Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society…. To justify and...

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable

Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they’re all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.