As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

Suddenly that it was as dangerous to be in America as it was to be overseas. So that the false distinction that's made by the anti-war movement between being over there and over here was exposed for all to see as an illusion. Although a number of people, a large amount of people still share in it. In other words, when I've been in Iraq or Afghanistan, I've probably been safer because I can carry a weapon if I have to, than my wife and daughter are living in Washington.

So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.

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

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.