Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

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.

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.