It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.