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

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

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

The period of Prohibition - called the noble experiment - brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.

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