I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

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.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Having no talent is no longer enough.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]