Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchenswas an English-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.
The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.
Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.
The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.
I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.
Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.
I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.
I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.