Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
Come to me and show me a small cancer and I’ll tell you you’ve got a small cancer that should be cut out. That’s realism but in America it’s called cynicism.
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.
Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.
Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.
The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself.
Envy is the central fact of American life.
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.
You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
Reality is something the human race doesn’t handle very well.
When anyone says to me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ I say, ‘Why should I, if you can’t?’
Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
Always a godfather, never a god.