“As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.”

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.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.

Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.

I hate nobody.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.