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.

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.

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.

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

Our sphere of influence should reflect righteousness

Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

I look up in the sky, what do I see? Well blue.

I enjoyed playing around with Paulie in the Rocky films, and it was a pleasure every three, four years, coming back seeing how the wardrobe is. Is he heavy? Is he thin? I had fun.

Feast, and your halls are crowded Fast, and the world goes by Succeed and give, and it helps you live But no man can help you die

The cello is not one of my favourite instruments. It has such a lugubrious sound, like someone reading a will.

I've never thought of myself as an actor, so somebody recognizing me for that would be a real shock.

I'm drawn to roles that have real substance, that aren't just the victim or the teenage girl or the girlfriend.

The guiding principle of my life, 'the means are the ends,' has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.