'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

I have seen the future! Go back!

Jesus died for your sins. I'm doing it for your mere entertainment dollar.

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Apply just the right amount of force — never too much, never too little.

Ah, but the servant waits, while the master baits.

Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.

Anything that is stifled will eventually ferment or explode.

When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.