“He who is last had best laugh.”

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.

TV news is not very instructive.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.

The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.

I’m always an optimist!

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.

Victory is for those who can say “Victory is mine”. Success is for those who can begin saying “I will succeed” and say “I have succeeded” in the end.

The films I do always have a happy ending. I hope it reflects back to real life.

In the end, I still have the same hope as my father – that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the last word.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

After all, what was more important, in the end, than love?

I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.