As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we a….

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out..

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists..

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and stee….

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that….

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death..

Boredom slays more of existence than war..

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness de….

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube..

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag..

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce..

When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be in….

I'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative art….

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again..

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow….

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopp….

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle..

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain ….

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself….

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style..

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?.