What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.