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.

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.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.