Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was.

What is a political party but a conspiracy?

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

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