With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn't. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn't win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one.

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

It all comes down to who does the dishes.