“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”
“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”
“Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.”
“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.”
“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”
“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”
“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.”
“School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.”
“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”
“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”
“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
“If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”
“For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.”
“That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”
“It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.”
“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”
“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”
“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”
“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”
“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.”
“The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”