Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.
Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.
The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can’t fly home.
All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.
In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.
The term ‘the American Left’ is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn’t really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.
There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.
I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.
If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.