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.

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'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement, '" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.

Life comes from light: if we are under God’s shining light, life will be generated and the divine life will grow in us.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

We carry in our worlds that flourish, our worlds that have failed.

Get thee behind me Satan, and push me along. I'm kin to the devil.

It [Calvinism] established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king.

Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.

We sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favors.

It’s a shame...you just don’t see young people doing anything outside these days.