“What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.

Love is not my bag.

Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.

The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.

Gossip is conversation about people.

Corporations must pay tax.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

He who is last had best laugh.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.

I saw the world. I learnt of new cultures. I flew across an ocean. I wore women’s clothing. Made a friend. Fell in love. Who cares if I lost a wager?

Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared.

I love where I’m from. I don’t live there because of the circumstances, but all my family is there. It’s what’s inside, it’s not what’s outside that determines the culture and the feeling.

We must link Azamgarh to art and culture and not with terrorism and crime.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

We must raise resources by curbing wasteful expenditure. That’s why I resolved that the hooter culture, where VIPs are provided red-beacon cars at taxpayers’ expense, must end.