'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.