Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.
As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.
The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.
Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.
It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.
Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.
In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.
Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.
Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography
These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.
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.
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.
It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.
If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
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.
A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.