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

You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.