It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

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.

From the age of 1 to 6 there is a small percentage that is exclusively homosexual, a small percentage heterosexual and there's a wide band in the middle of people who respond to various stimuli. A little bit here, a little more there.

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

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.~