“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’

Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.

I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

The world of sexual abuse is quintessentiall y secret. It is the perfect crime.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act?

Der, die, das, dem, den, des. German’s six ways of saying ‘the’, like six sexual positions you never knew existed. Hey, I just sprung a boner.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.

The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.