Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

You don't have to know someone your whole life to know them. Not really. Lonely is the same everywhere.

I try to carve my own way so the actors who come after me will say, "I want to do it like Columbus did it."

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

The idea of trying to create things that last-forever knowledge-has guided my work for a long time now.

Collins masterfully blends fact and fiction...transcends the historical thriller.

Because you can't keep up the illusion forever," I say. "No one has that much magic.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

History at its best is a gritty, dirty business.

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

Flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog. Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing.