Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Reviews don't bother me.
The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.
Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.
I love cops; I'm fascinated by the criminal justice system.
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
Evading military service has a long history in American life.
Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.
Conspiracy is a small but durable seller, retooled every year or so.
You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized
Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.
I am willing to believe, but I do not have the gift of faith. I'm skeptical.
There are no legends about the Duponts; the legends are about Howard Hughes.
Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.
'Time' was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964.
I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.
I got 'The Red White and Blue' out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.
I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.
The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.
All life is inherently dangerous. But beyond that, Los Angeles is just a wonderful place to be.
Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.
The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal.
I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.
Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.
I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.
I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.
In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.
Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.
Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.
Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.
I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.
Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.
The myth of the Kennedys - and the hold - was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.
What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.
The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.
In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.
Life is much more available in New York - there are a dozen movie theaters within walking distance. Living in California is easier, but you get sedentary.
Most anyplace one lives is essentially dangerous. There are floods in the Midwest, and tornadoes. There are hurricanes along the Gulf. In New York, you get mugged.
The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.
The volunteer military has always been most enthusiastically, even devoutly, embraced by those who would not themselves dream of volunteering - or of encouraging their children to do so.
No professional athlete likes to admit that he has played too long. There is too much money involved, rarely enough saved, and there is the eternal hope that age has not withered skills.
There was no pretense to objectivity; 'Time' had a partisan Republican point of view, and if it was one not shared by many of its gentrified Ivy Leaguers, few felt the compulsion to quit.
An Episcopalian military institution when it was founded near the turn of the century, Harvard for years had an implicit quota system that effectively limited the number of Jewish admissions.
New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.