Washington DC Culture Quotes

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.

One has to live in Washington to know what a city of rumors it is.

I find it shocking that anybody can be brought down in D.C. for gossip, ostensibly. I thought that was the coin of the realm there. That's like getting hit with lightning on a cloudless day.

Stick on this that Donald Trump as the outsider doesn't know what's going on. That the inside-the-Beltway culture is special and it's so unique and it's so tiny that nobody that's not part of it could ever, ever function. Nobody who's not in the establishment could possibly understand it. So they have an arrogance that leads to a condescension against people, which leads the inside-the-Beltway, the establishment, both parties, to think of Trump as no different than his voters, a bumpkin idiot.

I've still got a lot to learn about Washington. Thursday, I accidentally spent some of my own money.

... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.