Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

Life had sure been simpler when I hadn't dated.

Stark truth, is seldom met with open arms.

Must we do not know all the good that a simple smile can do

We believe the ice sheet was not around all the time. It was only around during cool snaps of the climate.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

We are built to worship.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

First, we need to focus government on the things that are required of the State. Second, we need to achieve competence in government so that the State delivers on the things it sets out to do.

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

I'm not a vampire but I feel like one