We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

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.