Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Condon

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Richard Condon.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Richard Condon

Richard Thomas Condon was an American political novelist. Though his works were satire, they were generally transformed into thrillers or semi-thrillers in other media, such as cinema. All 26 books were written in distinctive Condon style, which combined a fast pace, outrage, and frequent humor while focusing almost obsessively on monetary greed and political corruption. Condon himself once said: "Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them." Condon's books were occasionally bestsellers, and a number of his books were made into films; he is primarily remembered for his 1959 The Manchurian Candidate and, many years later, a series of four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi.

What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
Although the paranoiacs make the great leaders, it's the resenters who make their best instruments because the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins.
Made by General Motors, on order from Sears Roebuck. — © Richard Condon
Made by General Motors, on order from Sears Roebuck.
Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there's absolutely nothing else to do.
In Mexico the gods ruled, the priests interpreted and interposed, and the people obeyed.In Spain, the priests ruled, the king interpreted and interposed, and the gods obeyed. A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.
Over-eating is the most worthy of sins. It neither breaks up marriages nor causes road accidents.
I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now.
The human comedy begins with a vertical smile.
I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.
Cheese. The adult form of milk.
When I was a Hollywood press agent, I learned how the Hollywood casting system worked. There was a roster of actors who were always perfect as doctors or lawyers or laborers, and the directors just picked the types they needed and stuffed them into film after film. I do the same [with my characters], book after book.
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