Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.