Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.