I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn't begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.