The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
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.
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.
Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.
Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn’t finished coloring either one of them.
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.
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can’t always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.
It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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.
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman.
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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.
We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.
It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.
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 am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.
…is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.
Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
…Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.
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.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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.
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.
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
‘The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
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.
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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.
I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.