I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

The ideal to which John Adams subscribed-that we would be a nation of laws, not of men-was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.