An author is a fool who not content with boring those he lives with insists on boring future generations.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

They have the ability to take a person's freedom from them. On certain situations they have the ability to take a person's reputation. And under certain circumstances they have the authority to take a person's life.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Most men after a little freedom have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government. But from the beginning this nation trusted in God not man. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution.

I'm not a food critic and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

We'll have a public power authority which will also have the ability to build power or finance power. And more importantly we'll have more power than our economy provides. All of that will give us leverage we don't have today.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain Earnest Hemingway Jack London Harriett Beecher Stowe Pearl Buck Charles Dickens Rudyard Kipling Alfred Lord Tennyson to name a few.

The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich beautiful and famous more authority than they deserve.