You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

To travel is to shop.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.