The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.

It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.