It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.

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

People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.