I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

I dont make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: everything. Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything!

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.

Memory narrativises itself.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.