A Good Writer Can Watch A Cat

I Grew Up In A Completely Bookless Household. It Was My Father's Boast That He Had Never Read A Book From End To End. I Don't Remember Any Of His Ladies Being Bookish. So I Was Entirely Dependent On My Schoolteachers For My Early Reading With The Exception Of The Wind In The Willows, Which A Stepmother Read To Me When I Was In Hospital.

On One Hand We Go Like Hell For Every Terror Cell We Can Find, We Penetrate It, We Destroy It. On The Other Hand, There Is A Much Bigger Need For A Political Solution.

Ideologies Have No Heart Of Their Own. They're The Whores And Angels Of Our Striving Selves.

I Think I'm In The Same Mood As Ever, But In Some Ways More Mature. I Guess You Could Say That, At 65, When You've Seen The World Shape Up As I Have, There Are Only Two Things You Can Do: Laugh Or Kill Yourself.

I Think That Most Of My Books Are Part Of Some Process Of Self-education, Often About The Places I Go To. Most Of All, They Are About The Peculiar Tension Between Institutional Loyalty And Loyalty To Oneself; The Mystery Of Patriotism, For A Brit Of My Age And Generation, Where It Runs, How It Should Be Defined, What It's Worth And What A Corrupting Force It Can Be When Misapplied. All That Stuff Is Just In Me And It Comes Out In The Characters. I Don't Mean To Preach, But I Know I Do, And I'm A Very Flawed Person. It's Quite Ridiculous.