Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another.

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.

They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.