Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.
Washington, under Democrats and Republicans, has a profoundly neurotic attitude toward 'the people. ' It is built on equal parts of suspicion, loathing, fear, respect and dependence.
There's nothing so dangerous for manipulators as people who choose to think for themselves.
There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.
In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.
Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. . . . What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.
Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.
Acting is divine dissatisfaction. It's the greatest thing in the world to do, but you are never satisfied with it ever.
After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious. . . . Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late.
With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.
It's harder that in looks," I told him when I finally got back in the car. "Most things are.