We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.

In the modern age where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.

The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

Truth and reconciliation' are always combined, but I would split them: I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.

The advent of interconnectedness and of weapons of mass destruction means that, increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy.

There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with 15th-century titles upholding 19th-century prejudices.

I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.

Politics is compromise.

I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.

The United States will remain the most powerful nation on Earth for the next 10, 15 years, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered.

I read nonfiction for information, fiction for truth.

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.

Are you living just a little and calling that life?

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

We are well on our way to becoming a banana republic in every respect except, of course, that we don't grow bananas.

Whenever the work is itself light, it becomes necessary, in order to economize time, to increase the velocity.

I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.

It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

I had the habit of not accepting prizes or honors, but always, not out of humility, but because I don't like them. Maybe it's a little crazy, but it's good to have it, but I just don't like them.

If a country can only be rich by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once, perish such riches!