The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.