There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.

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.

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

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

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.