“Maybe I know nothing about politics, but if this is getting you votes, I am a Martian astronaut!”

Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 28
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: I'm going to ask you something. If I do get killed, and I honestly don't see how I can help it, I want you to write that book we were thinking about when I enlisted. If I get it, it's a cinch I won't be able to do it, and it would make me feel a whole lot better to know that if not my name and hand, at least, the thot of me would be passed on and not forgotten entirely. You know, sort of put into the book the promise that I had and the things I might have written so at least the knowledge of talent wasted won't be lost... If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.

Attributed to Kael after the 1972 American Presidential election, which Nixon won easily. This misquote is presumably based on "I live in a rather special world." above, but there is no evidence that Kael was mystified or surprised by that election's outcome.
Misattributed

Scriptures
Source: "I am That." P.51.

Ah, ma foi! Je n'en sais rien. Moi je suis mon ancêtre.
When needled about his lack of noble ancestry, recounted in Sydney Smith, Saba Holland, A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith (1855), p. 245. Compare: "Curtius Rufus seems to me to be descended from himself", Tacitus recounting a saying of Tiberius, Annals, book xi. c. xxi. 16.; "To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker’s son] for his mean birth, 'My nobility,' said he, 'begins in me, but yours ends in you'", Plutarch Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders, Iphicrates (rejected by some critics as not a genuine work of Plutarch).

Quoted in interview with Jack Fincher, "The University Has Become a Factory," Life magazine (1965-02-26).

Letter 11, 1.
Letters, Book I

2010s, 2016, October, Second presidential debate (October 9, 2016)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)