Eisenhower's career demonstrated how it is possible to fool all the people all the time...'I may be stupid,' he once said at a press conference, 'but at least I'm sincere!' Actually, he was neither, but it suited his purpose to play the part of the bumbling man of good will who was 'not an expert in these matters' but somehow would do his best.

It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.

I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.

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