History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

My wife, the star I steer by.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

Some things may never change but other things can be so completely different that they make the things that don't change bearable.

Line of control should be a garden, a place of art and cultural festival.

Your life can only be as beautiful as you repeatedly interpret it to be.

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science.

We have churches full of people who profess all kinds of stuff that they don't believe. They think that by professing it they're doing something good. Really, they're just deluding themselves.

I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.

The peculiar fascination of the brain lies in the fact that there is probably no other object of scientific enquiry about which we know at once so much and yet understand so little.

So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest.

If we're on long-haul flights I've been known to sleep on the floor so I hear the engine.