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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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...

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.

I don’t want anything. I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it...

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? to the designer of the camera? To the finger...

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.

Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential...

It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they...

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.

Miss Georgia and Mr Shaker Heights.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices

For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

[Howard’s] eyes were open and very clear. I’d forgotten what a beautiful gray they were–illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through...

I don’t see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.”

I’m a born-again atheist.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie ”answers” questions on TV while...

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared....