Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.

I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.