You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

Mailer's Law: A thing either gets better or it costs more to run it the way it was.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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

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.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.