Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last. - Gore Vidal

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically, “It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.