I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

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

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

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.