It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

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

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.