Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

We all have names we don't know about.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

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