Foreign governments are going to be poring through all these Donald Trump tweets looking for - to try and discern what it means for foreign policy.

Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance.

What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

Mike Pence came out and said this was a courtesy call, then Donald Trump a few hours later went on Twitter, as is his wont, and essentially linked the call to Taiwan with a whole series of things he doesn't like about Chinese economic and foreign policies and implied that the U.S. views of the status of Taiwan are now up for negotiation, that he wants them to be part of a broader negotiation with China about a whole series of economic and foreign policy issues. So, we just don't really know what exactly they're planing to do with this.

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

The one thing that you can say about the new Cabinet Donald Trump is putting together. That seems to be one of the coherent themes. They're very, very skeptical about Iran.