To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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.
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
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.
Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.
The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
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.
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.