Deciding to write a novel about something – as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something – sounds to me like a good evocation of writer’s block.
At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.
You can’t be up the reader’s ass, as many a writer I think is – cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that’s not loving the reader in the right way. That’s toadying to the reader.
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice – registry offices, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the disposable diaper – is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
I hire tea by the tea bag.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn’t matter what creed or colour they are.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
We all have names we don’t know about.
When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
I want incremental improvements. There’s the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general – it’s dreadful.
So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren’t even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe – it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.
America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
There isn’t what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press – where they’re looking around for something to attack. You don’t feel that there’s a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.