Mallon Quotes

#1. American secretaries of state have typically been more buttoned up than bon vivant, but John Quincy Adams's diplomatic successes - bigger than anything presidential or legislative that he achieved - still surprise a student of his personality.

Thomas Mallon

#2. My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.

Maureen Dowd

#3. he'd spent his whole life trying to make God love him - and that this didn't matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.

Thomas Mallon

#4. There's no such thing as a short review. It will take a long time to get it started. That's the reality. And it will be probably even longer to complete it.

Seamus Mallon

#5. The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.

Thomas Mallon

#6. I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.

Thomas Mallon

#7. The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

Thomas Mallon

#8. Bobby Kennedy's conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president.

Thomas Mallon

#9. Daisy loved all parades, especially this one, whose crush of observers, prone to impulsive kisses, made it one more piece of the mistletoe under which she lived her life

Thomas Mallon

#10. Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.

Thomas Mallon

#11. One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Thomas Mallon

#12. 'National Review' came along, in '55, at the moment when American conservatism most needed it.

Thomas Mallon

#13. Of all Americans who have appeared on the nation's postage stamps, Ayn Rand is probably the only one to have thought that the United States government has no business delivering mail.

Thomas Mallon

#14. I think that the worst form of naivete can be extreme cynicism. If you think that nobody comes to Washington to do any good whatsoever, that is almost as bad as being starry-eyed and thinking that they are all here to advance democracy.

Thomas Mallon

#15. I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

Thomas Mallon

#16. With 'Fellow Travelers,' I think I was consciously trying to imagine what my own life as a gay man might have been like if I'd been born exactly 20 years earlier.

Thomas Mallon

#17. I was raised - and still consider myself to be - Catholic, though I'm non-practicing and haven't fulfilled my Easter duty since sometime during the Nixon years. I'm assailed by all kinds of stimulating doubts, but I do believe in God.

Thomas Mallon

#18. Where there is unity, there is always victory

Publilius Syrus

#19. I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

Thomas Mallon

#20. (about Voltaire)...he was generally unbedeviled by any foolish consistency.

Thomas Mallon

#21. All our words ought to be filled with true sweetness and grace; and this will be so if we mingle the useful with the sweet.

John Calvin

#22. It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.

J.L. Austin

#23. Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.

Thomas Mallon

#24. And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.

Woodrow Wilson

#25. Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.

Thomas Mallon

#26. To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

Thomas Mallon

#27. This chapter reviews the knowledge and practice that social workers need to establish beginning competency in working with transgender and gender nonconforming persons.

Gerald P. Mallon

#28. I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Patrick Carney

#29. [Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Amos Tversky

#30. My house in Connecticut is very quiet, and when I'm trying to concentrate, I don't even allow the cat inside my second-floor study.

Thomas Mallon

#31. I've always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

Thomas Mallon

#32. I actually think that 'Bandbox,' by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.

Thomas Mallon

#33. The green appeal of solar sailing - traveling by light, once chemical propellants have done their dirty job of orbital insertion - ought to be powerful.

Thomas Mallon

#34. I'm not convinced that Nixon would have survived in office if he'd burned the tapes, but I do believe he would have served out his presidency if he'd never made them in the first place.

Thomas Mallon