By the end of the '60s and into the '70s...I felt more and more that I was no longer interesting as a subject to myself. In a way, I was no longer perceiving things through myself. I was beginning to look at the world more objectively, and I think my work turned around a bit in other directions....

I think...for anyone who's become an author early and has had a good deal of success, as [Truman] Capote did and [Gore] Vidal did and [William] Styron did and I did, it's not automatic or easy afterwards to look upon other people with a simple interest because generally speaking they're more interested in us than we are in them. This has nothing to do with character, but with the social situation—I am more interested in Marlon Brando than he is interested in me—and it has an immense impact when you're young. You become a mirror and the only way you can perceive events is through the mirror of your self....

By the time I started that book, I'd probably been nettled by people saying, "He can't write simply." The Executioner's Song was my way of saying, "Hey, look, it's very easy to write simply. It's very easy to write objectively; if you know how to write, you can write anything and you can write in any style." Style is merely a reflection of deeper talents that one hopes to possess.

— Interview in The New York Times Book Review

1998

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words....

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other—where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it....

There's a detachment that you need as a writer. And as a young man, I probably had more detachment than I have today. So that part of me was just looking at the battlefield, and it was certainly full of horrors. There was a lieutenant with us and a driver and another enlisted man like myself. And I think they were shocked profoundly. I just thought—this is a cold and cruel thing to say, but it's the way a writer is—I thought, "Oh, this is good." Not that it was good that all these people are dead. But "Oh, it's so good for writing." There was a sense of, "This can be used."

— Interview on French television

On other topics

1959

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

— "Hip, Hell and the navigator" Western Review

There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

— Advertisements for Myself

1960

The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.

— "Superman Comes to the Supermarket"

1982

Take running for office.... On the one hand, I learn an awful lot about the political process, so I'm not so paranoid about it as I was and, parenthetically, I also ended up with a little more respect for politicians. But in the course of learning this, I ended up making eight speeches a day for three months, and I'm sure I did something to my spontaneous gifts of oratory forever—which bear some reflection on your power to form sentences in the loneliness of the room in which you do your work. You know, I'm probably a less polished writer as a result of running for office and making all those damn impromptu speeches. It ages the brain a little.

— Interview in The New York Times Book Review

1991

I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous. But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash—that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.

— Interview in Time magazine

Critique • Works • Views and quotes