Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming ….

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied….

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday..

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and ….

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. W….

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature..

There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political..

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems..

My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suit….

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience..

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time..

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupation….

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative..

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions..

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers..

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of….

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation..

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he….

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances ….

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing ….

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history..