“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.”

I can understand companionship.

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

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.

For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

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.

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing i could never have him.

It is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.

Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.