Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.