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

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

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.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

We're not a democracy.

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

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

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

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

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

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

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

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

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