"The unfed mind devours itself."

"How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself."

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note."

"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."

"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

"The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself."

"It is not enough merely to win; others must lose."

"I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out."

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race."

"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

"I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place"

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"Always a godfather, never a god."

"We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing."

"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death."

"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60."

"To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all."

"Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!"

"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."

"Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family."

"A writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)"

"As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing--not art, not sex--more than going to the movies."

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."

"Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors."

"Love is a fan club with only two fans."

"I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place."

"Never offend an enemy in a small way."

"Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."

"Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again."

"The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all."

"Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil."

"Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all."

"Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well."

"In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death"

"I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not."

"We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in."

"How hungrily we read about ourselves!"

"The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

"Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral."

"Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none."

"If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well."