Quotes

[on Cary Grant] To women, he is Hollywood's lone example of the Sexy Gentlemen. And to men and women, he is Hollywood's lone example of a figure America, like most of the West, has needed all along: a Romantic Bourgeois Hero.

[on Elaine's restaurant in New York City] It was Clay Felker who really put that place on the map. So he had an article done for New York magazine, and that's all it took. The next thing you know, there's directors, actors, broadcasters like Tom Brokaw coming in.

[on visiting a strip club to explore some background for a novel] I'd shaken the hands of about five girls - only they don't shake hands. Their greeting is to clasp you on the inside of the thigh. Very friendly. I had on a necktie. I guess nobody else did in the whole place.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology..the new way of killing time. It's replaced knitting and things like that.

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. And also I have a new device in this book ['Back to Blood']. Inner monologues are set between a row of six colons at the beginning and six colons at the end. I rather like that, if I might praise myself.

[on being asked if he read the reviews of his books] Oh, I pretend to be like Arnold Bennett, the British novelist who was very popular in the '20s and '30s, He was considered a light-weight, so he didn't get particularly good reviews. He would say, 'I don't read my reviews. I measure them.' But if they come to my attention, I'll read them and I'll suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune just like anybody else.

I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!