We are the United States of Amnesia.

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never...

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

The unfed mind devours itself.

There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.

I was too polite to ask

In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that...

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

I’m a born-again atheist

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather...

He will lie even when it is inconvenient: the sign of the true artist.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink

And a Happy New Year to you.

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but...

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

He (Donald) is thorough and very careful not to take sides when there’s insufficient evidence,

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you’re born that, you can’t change it. You’re going to do it whether you want to or not.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.

Most writers write books that they wouldn’t read. I ought to know; I’ve done it myself.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

…Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don’t get on very well within marriage,...

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as...

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

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.