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

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.

It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

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

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

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.