I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.

Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...

I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.

A man is known by the company he keeps not by the company he works.

You are a gold mine of potential power. You have to dig to find it and make it real.

Silence, like madness, is only comparative.

I watched as she, with a half-life-worth of anger and resolve, flickered into this dark night and tried with all her might to get back what was taken from her.

How you live does not depend so much on what life brings you as on the attitude that you approach your life with.

What gets me pretty pissed off is the whole Monsanto engineered foods issue.

Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid.

The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair, eternal death.