40 quotes
Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.
It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)