If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

The best way to get out of debt is not to seek to get out of debt, but to seek to create wealth

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?