“The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.”

I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.

What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

I love fairytales. I like fantasy a lot, science fiction, I like magic. I like to create magic. I love magic.

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.