Never have children, only grandchildren.

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.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character.