Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.
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.
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
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.
Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.
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.
Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
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.
We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)
Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.
The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.
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.~
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
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’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.
Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
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.
The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.
If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.
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.
No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.
By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.
While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
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.
Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be.
I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
I like Italy. I was always at home there, it's a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.
I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'
You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.
People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.
When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.
Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.
There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.
I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.
I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.
Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.
Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.