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

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.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.