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.
One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they’ve “done” Machu Picchu: “Okay, we’ve done magical realism,” so now we can throw it out.
It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.
It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d’etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.
The American vice is explanation.