“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.”

Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.

The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

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.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.

I’m always an optimist!

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.

Love is not my bag.

Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

I’ve had a lot of operations. I’m kind of like Franken-actor.

You have to operate from the sense of everything is new and you’re starting again.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

I’ve had a hip replacement, I’ve beaten cancer, I had my hand operation, and I stopped drinking. Something inside of me just went, ‘I’m done.’

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.

The only reason I’d ever get a sex change operation is to see what it’s like to be right all the time.