The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.