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

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.

There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

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.

I think I know how to raise a kid. You just play catch with ’em. You just talk about life, and you distract them by throwing the ball. They don’t even notice that you’re filling up their heads with your theories.

I fill the shadow of the girl you want, a placeholder to the one I know you’d rather – I’ll do for now, but not forever.

There’s no tiling moral about beauty.

Even if it’s something so simple as filling myself up with uplifting meditation so it’s easier to spread kindness and love by the time I walk out my door and enter the world.

The nice thing about being on stage is it’s not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I’m up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

Fling out, fling out, with cheer and shout, To all the winds of Our Country’s Banner!

A Christian home! What a power it is to the child when he is far away in the cold, tempting world, and voices of sin are filling his ears, and his feet stand on slippery places.