"I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place."

"Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."

"Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again."

"The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all."

"Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil."

"Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all."

"Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well."

"In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death"

"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."

"We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in."

"How hungrily we read about ourselves!"

"The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

"Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral."

"Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none."

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

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

"Since nothing is free, to each his price."

"In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are."

"Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]"

"The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change."

"Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will."

"Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before."

"Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world."

"No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves."

"Americans tend to play different roles, hoping that somehow they’ll stumble on the right one."

"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them."

"For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more."

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

"Eventually all things are known. And few matter."

"Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury."

"Christianity is such a silly religion."

"I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track."

"For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn’t finished coloring either one of them."

"It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us."

"Love is not my bag."

"Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.--Twitter post, July 29, 2012"

"Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society."

"To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round"

"That's why Priscus is wisest of all: silence cannot be judged. Silence masks all things or no thing. Only Priscus can tell us what his silence conceals, but since he won't, we suspect him great."

"A good deed never goes unpunished."

"We no longer live in a nation, but in a Homeland."

"To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved"