Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.