I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe.