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.
— Gore Vidal
I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters.
Most of our writers tend to be recorders.
An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.
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.
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
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.
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
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.
Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
I am only at home in the present.
For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
The unfed mind devours itself.
I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.
For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.
Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
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.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
Friends, there is no Left in American politics.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.
No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?
It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.
In actual fact, I have always been a conservative cross, borne sadly by liberal friends.
Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'
Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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.
TV news is not very instructive.
