Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.
Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else's expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch.
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.
There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome.
