Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a great believer in outlines.
Nonfiction is never going to die.
You're either on the bus or off the bus.
Put your good where it will do the most!
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
If you label it this, then it can't be that.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for.
A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.
You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later.
Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.
Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.
Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.
'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.
Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...
That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?
If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.
Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.
It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.