I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

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.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.