Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people’s lives, it’s a great subject.
I don’t think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that’s how one starts. Or I started.
We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn’t threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we’ve made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.
I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving – Italo Calvino.
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.
On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.
Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.
Let the dust take me when the adventure’s done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury.
Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you. – Twitter post, July 29, 2012.
To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved.
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.
Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states.
Seward appreciated the honest and open way that Stanton lied; it was the hallmark of the truly great lawyer, and demonstrated a professional mastery not unlike his own.
All over Greece, strangers of a certain age will greet one another with the question, “And where were you and what did you do when Xerxes came to Marathon?” Then they exchange lies.
Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.
None of this is quite true but 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.