People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.