Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you’ve been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.
God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.
Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.
Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.
We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.
Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.
I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.
I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
I like Italy. I was always at home there, it’s a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.
World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.
I don’t seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I’m realistic.
CO? emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?