Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.

If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.

Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'.

His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and no other, they were judged. He judged man not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his.

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.

As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents.

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.