Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

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.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

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

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.