Many people in the United States happen to believe that United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of western Europe and the other parts of the world.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

Christianity is such a silly religion.