Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

A good liar must have a good memory.

When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece.

It would have been very alarming - morally, and in other ways too - if an attack of that nature, the 11 September attacks, had not aroused in us and in our governments and societies the spirit of self-defence. If that had not been one of the responses it seems to me there would have been very grave cause for concern.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.