Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

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

It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

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.