...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death.

As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.