They who drink beer will think beer.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I’ve got to figure out how this book’s going to end. Otherwise, you’re going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

I think that I’m serious, but I don’t think that I’m inordinately bleak.

It never occurred to anyone in a responsible position that Germany and Russia might make common cause, even temporarily, against the West.

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

About 10 years ago, I took some vocal lessons. I’ll bet that helped. I got a tape of exercises that the girl gave me, which I don’t do anymore, but they were good. And I...

Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer’s block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter – now, computer – lit up a cigarette.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

I realized there was something I didn’t quite like in myself that I didn’t want to hear about.

For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn’t discover America.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look – it’s partly the glasses I wear – and people seem to remember me once they’ve...

Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.

How long that will last is another question because if they become more and more secure, they may, in fact, become more like West Europe.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

That is the strange thing; I don’t know if you want to call it the subconscious, but things that I don’t seem to notice are getting stored away.

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.

All children have creative power.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to...

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and...

When I was making Storytelling, I couldn’t watch while the violent sex scene between the student and the professor was being shot. It was too intense.

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man – the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse – the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon...

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as nuclei for the new network.

The reason I formed my own band in the first place is so that I could step up as the singer.

I became chairman of the inmates committee. Got into a lot of trouble. Was accused of fomenting a riot. Was accused of plotting to kill the warden.

I don’t want any more vicissitudes, I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already...

It was all luck and it all started with that radio piece. If it wasn’t for that, I’d probably still be cleaning apartments as a maid in New York.’

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.

What teens will realize is always a mystery to me. I’m still realizing so many things myself, very belatedly, that it seems unwise to think I have any right to be showing people things in...

The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God’s world.

The Jews struggled and stuck together. Their tenacity kept them alive. The fact that my book was a part of this struggle is my greatest achievement.