No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.