"What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"

"Since nothing is free, to each his price."

"In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are."

"Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]"

"The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change."

"Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will."

"Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before."

"Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world."

"No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves."

"Americans tend to play different roles, hoping that somehow they’ll stumble on the right one."

"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them."

"For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more."

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

"Eventually all things are known. And few matter."

"Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury."

"Christianity is such a silly religion."

"I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track."

"For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn’t finished coloring either one of them."

"It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us."

"Love is not my bag."

"Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.--Twitter post, July 29, 2012"

"Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society."

"To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round"

"That's why Priscus is wisest of all: silence cannot be judged. Silence masks all things or no thing. Only Priscus can tell us what his silence conceals, but since he won't, we suspect him great."

"A good deed never goes unpunished."

"We no longer live in a nation, but in a Homeland."

"To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved"

"What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions."

"Ronald Reagan is a triumph of the embalmer's art."

"It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life."

"Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale."

"Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on."

"Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot"

"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."

"I'm a born-again atheist."

"Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it."

"Say very mildly, we have only one political party in the U.S., the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat."

"...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist."

"That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb."

"...,I have never visited any city in the world where I was not told that I just missed the golden age. I seem never to be on time." Cyrus Sitema"

"I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife."

"Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."