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.

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

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 have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

I can imagine no heroism greater than motherhood.

There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death.

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

I had to shoot shotguns for The Blues Brothers. But I don't like that stuff. Too butch for me.

The world by and large has to be reinvented.

In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief.

With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there.

The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.