The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.

One thing you can't help noticing in South America and in Latin culture, generally, is how nice people are. Although when I went back to Spain - my mother lived in Spain and both my brothers lived there - after the Uruguay trip, I thought, "Oh great, Hispanic people." But they weren't nearly as nice as the Uruguayans. They're quite proud and pissed off, the Spaniards.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

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

I hire tea by the tea bag.

I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.

When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.