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Does one ever read a politician's books?

My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.

Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.

Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.

I'm always an optimist!

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.

To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

I hate nobody.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

He who is last had best laugh.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.

What I like least about myself is my belligerence.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.

Corporations must pay tax.

The media can't get anything straight.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

Gossip is conversation about people.

I can understand companionship.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

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.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

We're not a democracy.

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

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