When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.