And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.