Reality is a powerful solvent.

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.