Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

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.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.