A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

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.

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

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.

Pleasure and pain are on the same side of the coin of human experience. The opposite is indifference or numbness.

The amount of money we spend on education is important, but not nearly as important as how the money is spent.

Flying saucers are real. Too many good men have seen them, that don't have hallucinations.

There are big and little truths, but all belong to the same race.

Age is nothing; waking up is everything.

The ends justifies the means.

When you are a pit bull, and you love what you do and you are going to continue to grow, that talent will find its way out.

Mother would come and pick me up at work and take me wherever I could get a job. Mother didn't trust anybody with me. Usually we'd get home at 3 in the morning.

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm.

Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it's good.