Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.
Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.
I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.
Rejection is the one constant of human experience.
You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other's opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow.
Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.
I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.
To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company.
People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.
You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.'
People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.
No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.
I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I've never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?
Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?
The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.
'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.
'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.
Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.
