I quizzed him a lot on this point and i suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don't have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it'll cause a stir. And when you're asked to explain afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down.

Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, thats 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?