Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.
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.
I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.
My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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.
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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.
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.
Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
TV news is not very instructive.
Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.
Friends, there is no Left in American politics.
Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.
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.
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.
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
