Until you know who you are you can’t write.

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.