A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.