A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

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.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

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.