90 quotes
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?"
Experience (2000)
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
Einstein's Monsters (1987)
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
Einstein's Monsters (1987)
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
Novelists in Interview (1985)
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.
London Fields (1989)
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.
London Fields (1989)
"Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.
Einstein's Monsters (1987)
Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.
Success (1978)
We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.
London Fields (1989)
Money, now this has to be some good shit.
By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
Experience (2000)
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)
People don't change or improve much, but they do evolve. It is very slow.
Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)