I Don't Think In Terms

All Political Movements Are Like This - We Are In The Right, Everyone Else Is In The Wrong. The People On Our Own Side Who Disagree With Us Are Heretics, And They Start Becoming Enemies. With It Comes An Absolute Conviction Of Your Own Moral Superiority. There's Oversimplification In Everything, And A Terror Of Flexibility.

I Do Not Think Writers Or Anybody Would Sit Down And Think They Must Write About Some Cause, Or Theme, Or Something. If They Write About Their Own Experiences, Something True Is Going To Emerge.

When You Look At My Life, You Can Go Back To The Late 1930s, What I Saw Was, First Of All, Hitler, He Was Going To Live Forever. Mussolini Was In For 10,000 Years. You Had The Soviet Union, Which Was, By Definition, Going To Last Forever. There Was The British Empire -- Nobody Imagined It Could Come To An End. So Why Should One Believe In Any Kind Of Permanence?

My Mother Died Happily Of A Stroke In Her Seventies.

It Is Not Always Possible To Know, When You Make A Note Of An Event, Or A State Of Mind, How This May Strike Someone Perhaps Ten Thousand Years Later.