“Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.”

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

Gossip is conversation about people.

Corporations must pay tax.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

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

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

He who is last had best laugh.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

What I like least about myself is my belligerence.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

I am only at home in the present.

I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

If love and agreement are manifest in a single family, that family will advance, become illumined and spiritual.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Victor and vanquished never unite in substantial agreement.

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity.

No treaty is ever an impediment to a cheat.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.