Like all great leaders, she promises not just a better future, but a more dangerous one!

Ernst, Dali, the Facteur Cheval.

The future will be a struggle between huge competing systems of psychopathology.

Is the main role of Hollywood to save Americans from the need to grow up?

What you don't have is what Surrealism has: the representation for the first time of the inner world of the mind in terms of ordinary objects -- tables, chairs, telephones.

Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatred that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job.

It's a sign that something is deeply wrong with the societies that have evolved at the end of the 20th Century . . . People aren't moving into gated communities simply to avoid muggers and housebreakers, they're moving into gated communities to get away from other people.

A lot of men find driving extremely competitive.

These days one needed a full-scale emergency kit built into one's brain, plus a crash course in disaster survival, real and imagined.

And they'd probably be right.

Previously Ward had only seen this expression in the eyes of the very old.

How to get a grip on all this?

The constants of our lives, which most of us ignore: the wonder of existence.

Psychopathology is fun.

I'm not talking about someone like Adolph Hitler, but nowadays our world is so conformist, we need these crazy ogres, a dangerous personality to bring about change.

These days we don't notice other people's selfishness until we're on the receiving end ourselves.

The world's turning into a madhouse, one half of society gloating righteously over the torments of the other.

When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste for strangling cats, we lock him away.

Also tough French gangster movies.

In the first place, the idea is king.

One day it would stop, freeze forever on one frame.

Sadly, I think most people have lost the knack of reading them.

The next 20 years were a timeless limbo, where past and future were annexed into the present.

The great churches are empty; political ideology is finished; there's just a scramble for power.

Francis Bacon is, for me, the greatest British painter of the last century, unflinching in the way he returned the Gorgon's stare.

We might have been looking at a population of brilliantly designed robots placed there merely to establish a contextual landscape!

The fantasy that dominates our world, the enormous novel we live inside, is the new reality.

I don't consider what Isaac Asimov writes to be Science Fiction; rather a sort of technological folktale.

Remember, it's not enough to make history -- you've got to arrange for someone to record it for you.

I felt like saying, "Everything went nearly perfectly, but it should have been a Buick."

Once you're forty it's cheaper to hire some bright-eyed graduate clutching her little diploma.

Flying is a very strange experience -- it's very close to dreaming.

It's small, secluded and has a spectacular view with Cape Martin on the left and Monaco on the right.

Bikini Atoll, where the early atomic bombs were tested, and Eniwetok Atoll, over which the hydrogen bomb was detonated, are among the most sinister sites of the 20th-century imagination.

It was a big shock.

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous was itself an incitement to anger and revenge . . .

The notion that science sensibly applied to social problems will solve most of them and that we can all live in a kind of Corbusier world where tensions are defused by enlightened social legislation, and so on . . . hasn't really worked out.

Technology defines the conventions by which we recognize the world.

I wake at 8 AM and have a couple of cups of tea.

The test of a language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negotiable language of all.

At the same time they didn't have very much control over me, and I think a certain estrangement sprang up between myself and my parents which I never really recovered from.

Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe.

It's probably true that the most maligned species on Earth is the wealthy patron of modern art.

Together, women formed a conspiracy of glances entirely exchanged behind the backs of their menfolk.

A novel, like a painting, needs to be read within an intelligent and informed set of values, but you can go too far.

Contrary to general belief, no one's death diminishes us.

One of the reasons we've turned our backs against the future at present is that we unconsciously sense that the logics that will dictate our lives in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years will be completely unlike those which rule our lives today and have ruled our lives in the past.

In the first half of the 20th century, novelists had a very real impact on the way people saw the world.

These are now reversed and the external world, so-called, is now almost wholly a fiction.

London may well be the only world capital -- with the possible exception of Moscow -- that has gone from the 19th century to the 21st without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the 20th in any meaningful way.