I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

Sometimes people are so close to the material, they miss an important cross-reference. You can't drop this line because half an hour later, it affects that line. And the writer is the person who knows that immediately.

There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.