Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.