“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.”

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

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?

Rather than trying to figure out what other people should be doing, work on your own interactions in the world and whatever influence they have.

Sometimes the type of person from the old machine, who is everything but an appealing figure, happens to win an election. But democracy applies to everyone, not just the noble and the clever.

From earliest times, humans – explorers and thinkers – have wanted to figure out the shape of their world.

One day in the shower, you figure it out. It’s a special day in a man’s life. I was like, ‘Oh, I found me a hobby.’

I want to study marriage. I want to learn about it. I want to know it. I want to figure out whether or not I want to do it. I’m not just going to leap into it, because that’s not good for anybody.

I’m trying to figure it out. And I know as a team, it sucks losing a few in a row any time. So you know, we’ll snap out of it.

We keep ourselves so tied up in regretting the past and fearing the future that we don’t have any energy left to figure out who we are and what we want to create right now.

You want to embrace, but I can’t figure out how to hold on to it.