When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

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'm a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn't come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.