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

"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."

"Christianity is such a silly religion."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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