What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.

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