If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it /when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles.

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."

Outside The Whale (Granta, 1984)