Quotes About Author

With Clinton, of course, the term "world stage" was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved.

The Nobel Institute had nothing to say about him, other than that he had never won a Nobel Prize.

The interpretation of the observational science has been consistently over-egged to produce alarm.

Mann has the most closed mind in the scientific community.

Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long.

I don't think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

Why are we reading, if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed?

T]here is no separate, no relative world of literature. There is simply the world, with its infinite possibilities of representation.

People confuse me. Food doesn't.

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.

A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who's been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up.

His face was contorted with rage, muscles twitching beneath his skin like a nest of rattlesnakes in a thin cotton sack.

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist's innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

But this one was a writer, not a reader.

Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors.

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.

In a dead white field an untethered goat gave them sardonic greeting.