[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.