Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

If you want to be a good actor or director, firstly see life, secondly see films and thirdly read books!

You understand what I’m telling you, Tommy? You have a light inside you, and the only person who gets to decide whether that light shines or not is you.

...each heart is made of a different stone - no two feel alike nor break the same way ...

Sportsmanship is definitely an important thing in all sports. In soccer, we all respect each other on such a high level, between Sweden and Brazil and Japan or whatever team it is.

We don't have a good legal justification for breaking up the banking system. But if I could wave a magic wand, I'd break up the banking system.

Surrounding yourself with good people makes you feel better about yourself, making them strip tease makes you feel even better.

While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures.

I always took pictures, but about five or six years ago, I started taking more behind the scenes at SNL, and now I have some 60,000 photos sitting on my laptop.

The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science.

It is easier to grow in dignity than to make a start.