A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt's Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

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.