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.
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.
Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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.
Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called – or whatever it is they do.
The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography.
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
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.
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.
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.
I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party – the property party. It’s the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.
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.