I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

Free speech is life itself.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.