Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope not of despair.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

Am I not a man and brother?

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

We are who we are, be­cause of those we choose to love and be­cause of those who love us.

Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

And I'm okay with drowning.

Anytime someone calls you and identifies themselves with their full name, odds are it isn't someone you want to talk to under any circumstances.

I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

Women say they have sexual thoughts too. They have no idea. It's the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. If they knew what we were really thinking, they'd never stop slapping us.

I have no regrets because I know I did my best - all I could do.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.