It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.