Great Throughts Treasury

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

"Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

"What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions."

"What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons."

"When I was young, I was bored shitless with being desired by others. I don't look in the mirror anymore."

"When Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler the American left behaved like an anthill struck by lightning."

"When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags."

"When you get a hereditary disease, you realize you're part of the main. No matter how much you may have tried to be your own man, you're going to be like your parents."

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

"When she was running for the Senate, Hillary's psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately — I heard she said, "I remind them of their first wife.""

"Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments."

"World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual."

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note."

"You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque."

"You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have."

"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith."

"Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!"

"You hear so much about radical chic in New York, but itÂ’s more like radical dowdy."

"You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives."

"Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for their bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one."

"You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"

"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."