Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.