Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.