Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

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.

It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.

I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven't said.