“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.”

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.

There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The United States is a madhouse.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

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.