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.

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

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

The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.