All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

In Shanghai, I saw great contrasts. On one street there would be impressive shops selling copies of the latest word in glamorous European fashion, and around the corner on a back street there were poor families crammed into one room with a naked light bulb. One evening I heard a Chinese family singing "Happy Birthday." It was weird. You would have thought that they'd have their own happy birthday song. Every dominant society in the world - whether it's French or British or American - imposes its culture on less developed societies.