Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.