All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

I was born a writer. When that happens, you have no choice in the matter.

Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.