If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.
Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.
I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.
I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
I like Italy. I was always at home there, it’s a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.
World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.
I don’t seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I’m realistic.
CO? emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?
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.