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

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.

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.

Dine on little, and sup on less.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people’s lives, the lives of people you don’t know, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

Less gossiping, more learning. Less complaining, more excelling. Less walls, more bridges. Less fear, more courage.

I don’t like to go in places where women talk and gossip. The atmosphere I don’t like, even though you can sometimes meet nice people. For me, it’s a waste of time.

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.

Progress and civilization are the results of the efforts of genius, not the gossip of the majority.

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.