The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth

A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.

Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is not encouraging.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.

To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell.

I've been having an affair, but I still believe in family values.

More you know, better advice you give. Less you know, more advice you give.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

I don't watch things like Jeepers Creepers or Final Destination 53 ½. I really like more of the psychological thrillers.

It's not annoying if only a couple of people come up. If a bunch of them crowd around me, it's annoying.

There are no frictions between us, there is only rivalry.

But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.

You have to look beyond race because as a human being you have to experience the person from the inside first

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

I'm an introverted sort of writer.