There are four stages in a marriage. First there’s the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer – war, and the preparations for new war.
A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They’re not just ipso facto and just go on and on.
While I’m working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
You have the right to speak your mind.
I don’t read other writers because I’m writing all the time. It’s too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together.
There’s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
God is a creator, not a law giver.
I can’t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics – this is very selfish of me, but who cares – what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.
Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.