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.
Before the word gay had really been invented, was there’s no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters – based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions – would they make categories. Everybody’s everything.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
Obviously I’m in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care – if, that is, you’re going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.
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.
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: ‘Where are the readers?’
First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it’s too discouraging.
Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small ‘yes’ at the center of a vast ‘no.’
Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action...