We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children.

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children.

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.