You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

One thing you can't help noticing in South America and in Latin culture, generally, is how nice people are. Although when I went back to Spain - my mother lived in Spain and both my brothers lived there - after the Uruguay trip, I thought, "Oh great, Hispanic people." But they weren't nearly as nice as the Uruguayans. They're quite proud and pissed off, the Spaniards.

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

I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.

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.