[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

You can only have one aim per debate.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil.

There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.