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...
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 am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.
Christianity is such a silly religion.
In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.