I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone.
If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.
Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.
Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.
Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.
Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.
I usually have to find something where I go, "I have to do this. " Sometimes you don't even know what the question you're trying to answer is, but you go, "This is something I need to explore and want to explore, and it's inside me in a way that I think I can do a good job with. "
What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.