At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do ….

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write..

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so..

Alimony is the curse of the writing class..

A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on..

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - s….

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual..

The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world..

You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating eff….

I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the mos….

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in ….

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to disc….

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much..

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of ve….

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human….

For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself..

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to thi….

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself..

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style..

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, b….

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roof….