An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

It is a pity that...the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of "Me Decade" possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.

We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, "Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind."