Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Gore Vidal
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
The unfed mind devours itself.
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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.
Never have children, only grandchildren.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
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.
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.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.
The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
