Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.

In analysing complicated variations one must examine each branch of the tree once and once only.

Since man's natural instincts lead him to sin, all men are sinners; and all sinners go to hell. If everyone goes to hell, then you will meet all your friends there.

In human history there has been a continuous and growing impulse toward the regeneration and transformation of humanity.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

My goal was to be a network correspondent by the time I was 30.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

You have to stand up for some things in this world.

It's men you should be afraid of, not monsters.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept