Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

I think Jorge Borges said that when Argentineans die they turn into angels and go and live in Uruguay. But for the rest of South America, you have to say that it's getting there - becoming civilized - and will get there. It's had a real grit war in history. The choice between those societies until recently was the choice between tyranny and chaos. Everyone understood that. You've got to have a strong man, or it's going to be a mess.

There's Chile and there's Uruguay, and no one quite knows why Uruguay is so appealingly selfless because they've had their terror and their revolution like all the rest. But somehow, there's something in them.

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.