When the [US] president writes to Kim Jong Il, the son, the Dear Leader, he doesn't call him Dear Mr President, he calls him Dear Mr Secretary. Have you ever noticed that? Why is that? Because he's not the president of North Korea, he's the head of the Communist Party, the North Korean Workers' Party and he's the head of the Army. He's not head of the state. The head of the state is his father, who's been dead for 15 years.

A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.