“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.

I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police “first greeting”. “Oi!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?

It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.

It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

Are they really gods?” “I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace – that makes them a police matter.

If I did things for the money, I’d have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and ‘Police Academy 6,’ which I was asked to write.

I would make myself head of the style police and we would fight fiercely against sloppiness.

The name Bei Dao was actually given to me with the help of friends. When we were publishing our unofficial magazine, Today, we wanted to avoid being harassed by the police so we were trying to think of names that we could use. It was done very casually.