“In order to play and write, it’s unique – you either do one or the other.”

I’m not fit company for man or beast.

Chain letters are the postal equivalent of intestinal flu: you get it and pass it along to your friends.

If you want something hard enough, it just gets done.

Love or not, I wouldn’t subject a wife to the road. It’s punishment.

I think everything should happen at halfway to dawn. That’s when all the heads of government should meet. I think everybody would fall in love.

My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.

The idea was to restore the rule of law, to bring order to a chaotic situation.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, “It’s better this way.” But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

IN order to inform what I’m doing; otherwise, it just becomes the snake eating its own tail. Vampirism.

The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls.

In order to improve democracy, then, it’s necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.