My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.