My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.
There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .
I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.
It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.
There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.