I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.

One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at.

There's something about New York. You can get a nice feeling of belonging as a writer here. It's probably the best city on Earth like that. I miss the wisecracking of New York.

In the '80s, the world I was living in wasn't this world of consumption. There wasn't that much to buy, really. Actually I'm still struck by that. There's not an awful lot of stuff I want. Somebody quotes Diogenes, who's walking around saying, "How many things there are in the marketplace of which Diogenes has no need." I always feel that. Except of course when you're living in Venice, California and you see all these lovely houses!

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

The thing that strikes me, from looking at the names so far in the Donald Trump's Cabinet on the foreign policy side, is the one thing that unites them - and that's General James Mattis at the Pentagon, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, even Mitt Romney to become secretary of state - they're all very, very hawkish on Iran.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.