Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools.

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love.

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.

A very close friend of mine keeps reminding me that since about the age of 50, I've been saying, 'I'm finished. I haven't got another one in me.' But somehow you do.

My essential identity is that of a writer.