Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.