Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.

If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.

Words are living things.

Integration is the most important asset Europe has, and the key component to European integration is the euro.

You don't simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away...I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.

I live a very privileged life, obviously. I'm an accomplished actor, I have a very solid normal family, tons of siblings, and a mother that loves me.

For instance, why are we terrorizing this country, leading with murder and mayhem, when crime is actually on the decline, as somebody, as somebody mentioned?

It is not enough to profess faith in the democratic process; we must do something about it.

The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.

Let the scriptures refresh you.