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

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

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

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.