At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.

I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.