In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.