Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.