Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.