We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.