"Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale."
"Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art."
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Source: Paris Review Interview (1981), later quoted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series, 1981.
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"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
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"The unfed mind devours itself."
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