“Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.”

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.

We’re not a democracy.

The unfed mind devours itself.

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts. What he at first chooses, at last compels.

The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably thought and act.

The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

In a dream like haze, the moment you left still spins on repeat like a broken record.

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.

The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.