These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.