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

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

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.

We number our days and divide our seasons. We endlessly define what it is to be in love. When in truth, spring blurs into summer and always has, long before that line was ever drawn.

I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, “Man, if that’s not a definition of God, I don’t know what is.

I don’t think there’s any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.

Truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I’ve had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions.