The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.