Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true-unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward-shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.