I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.