I say his version because there is no such thing as a true account of anything. Each sees the world from his own vantage point. Needless to say, a throne is not the best place from which to view anyth...
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
As I now move, graciously, I hope, towards the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.
A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers’ case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument...
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of...
We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.
It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the...
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes i...
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television.
It was of course Jefferson’s gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the right answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculat...
In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.Well! A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. What is the young Old Pa...
I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.
FBI slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise.
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.