I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?