“On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”

When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.

Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.

I hate nobody.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.