One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

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

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.

At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.

I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

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.