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

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.

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.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

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.

It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.