Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

It used to be the custom in this country that when you had made a career and were mature in judgment, you went to the Senate to give something back t the Republic. The idea that at age 25 you go out and buy a blow dryer and starting running for office is not what the founders had in mind

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.