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

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.

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.