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.

Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.

I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."