There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.
I take it for granted that there’s a side of me that loves public action, and there’s another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I’ve learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
I do believe that America’s deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.
Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.
The way you write affects what you say.
Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen.
The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people?
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
The fact that we’ve been a great democracy doesn’t mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
Dying can’t be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don’t understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.
Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.