That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.