I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable.

That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.