The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

I'm very happy by myself - I'm lucky in that way - if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

I can't find the compulsory mutilation of the genitals of children a subject for humor... It's designed to repress sexual pleasure... The full excision, not just the snip but the full mandatory covenant is fantastically painful, leads to trauma, leads to the dulling of the sexual relationship. And can be, in itself life-threatening at that moment. We have records, I can show them to you, of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds in the United States of boy babies who died or had life-threatening infections as a result of this disgusting practice.