This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.
Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was qui...
The natural impulse of men is to follow, he thought, and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate the rest.
The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.
The avenue was designed by Reichsminister Albert Speer and completed in 1957. It is one hundred and twenty-three meters wide and five-point-six kilometers in length. It is both wider, and two and a ha...
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.
Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
A crock of shit, Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.
People perish. Books are immortal.
Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too ho...
Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mo...
It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.
Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated...
Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195
Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-s...
By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, E...
It has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every...
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