One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?

I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.