Christopher Hitchens
When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.
I wanted to write.
I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.
Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.
I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
I like surprises.
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.
Chemotherapy isn't good for you.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.
I feel Anglo-American.
Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.
When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'
I'm not a sheep.
You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.
Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.
Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.
Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'
It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.
I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.
If you can talk, you can write.
The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'
I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.