The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.
A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance – And the myths that actually touched you at that time – not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas – but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.
You’re either on the bus or off the bus.
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later...
Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
Put your good where it will do the most!
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the ‘real world.’ So I started working for newspapers.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.
I don’t think journalists should talk about whom they’re voting for.