In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.