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.

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.

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.

For anyone aspiring to be anything, I would like them to realise dreams require work. So work big time.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

If you battle L, you picked the wrong head I smash mics like cornbread You can't kill me, I was born dead

The proper use of commas is often more art than science.

I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that.

Unkind people spread malicious tales, and well-intentioned people also censure; but in either case the tranquil sage remains unconcerned. Nowhere is there to be found a disconcerted sage.

Life is a vapor. It passes in the blink of an eye.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think the Democrat Party is taking its cue from the media. When the media has a narrative, whether it's the use of profanity, the Democratic Party follows it.

Americans are a wonderful people: They will always do the right thing--after exhausting every other possible alternative.