The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.

I think one thing writers can do is point out that you don't have to say openly racist things, like [Donald] Trump, to be a racist or a xenophobe.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about "welfare mothers" - a code phrase for people of colour.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.

There's gonna be a time when I'm way curvier, and that'll be sexy too. What defines sexy is not someone's weight. Personally I like curves. I wanna look good for me. I wanna feel good.

I don't feel like the real, transcendental sound experiences I've had in my life have anything to do with intellect.

Neil Young played Helpless, and by the time he finished, we were asking him if we could join his band

I grew up in Marin County north of San Francisco, and in the 1950s and '60s it was a natural paradise.

When two people love each other, they do not comply and does not dominate, only complement each other.

Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.

I love the idea that I'm the oldest one in the room because I can get away with anything!