There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

Beneath every history, another history.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.