When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.