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

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.