CO₂ emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.

Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.