I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.
As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Do nothing that is not natural – and ritual is natural – and all will be for the best.
I don’t see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
I’m in favor of sexual encounters.
If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.
If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.
I’m in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
Since the individual’s desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.
I don’t deny or affirm anything. I’m not very personal.
I don’t want anything. I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.
I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – good people.
We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean.
There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.