I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.