Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Next to "I win," "I told you so" are the sweetest words.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.