Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.
We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator – that’s beyond my conceit.
I’m very happy by myself – I’m lucky in that way – if I’ve got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.
The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.
People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.
It’s often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven’t been made.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don’t introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.
You have to choose your future regrets.
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that ‘he may tarry,’ we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday’s.
Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.
It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.