You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.