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

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The United States is a madhouse.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

I can understand companionship.

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.

For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.

I don’t want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

Barack Obama isn’t the first politician to break a promise, torture the truth or outright lie to the American people. But, he certainly is among the most accomplished at it.

It’s so cold here in Washington, D.C., that politicians have their hands in their own pockets.

The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.

A politician has finally understood that politics is not only about the closing of a mine in Ohio-it is also about the will to reach out, to embrace the world of today’s young Americans. That way, young Americans may eventually reconcile with politics.

I submit that President Obama and all the democrat politicians that voted for Obamacare never even read the proposed law.

[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.