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

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.

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.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.