In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, “the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.”
Populists have never had a good press in Freedom’s land.
People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It’s generally wrong. Or oversimplified – which is sometimes useful.
We’re supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don’t practice this glorious act.
I’m a much worse guest than I am a host, and I’m not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.
You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque.
Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can’t always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.
By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.
I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That’s my substitute for television.
Who gives a damn about being remembered? That’s really for amateurs.
The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy.
Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us.
Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.
One’s neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.