124 quotes
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946 … We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.
An American Dream (1965)
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
Interview for French TV (1998)
Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Barbary Shore (1951)
Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.
The Executioner's Song (1979)
To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic.
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
Cannibals and Christians (1966)
So we think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Marilyn (1973)
Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
The appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State.
I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it.
TIME interview (1991)
Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today.
Interview for French TV (1998)
"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.