The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

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.

Reproduce yourself and fulfill your calling

Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

I keep forcing, I keep learning new things in the game, and so far I have been taking challenges as they come.

I feel that when I shoot anything, and I have something beautiful, I just move on.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

Most women who have done something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.

You try to squeeze a little more Charmin in the pads when you face him.

Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.

I never really thought we'd fitted into the cross-over drawer. But I think the real Sugar Ray fans did like us because we always had variety and because we experimented a lot.

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.