I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.