What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

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

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

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.

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