Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? ... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

Doubt is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

Some enemies are part and parcel of our lives, we cannot destroy them without risking our own survival

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Democracy is not being well served as we're accustomed to. There is less information, there's less investigation, there's less analysis, there's less accountability.

And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.

Everybody's got regrets. Everybody's made mistakes. Nobody's perfect.

Wisdom comes with all we see, God writes His lessons in each flower, And ev'ry singing bird or bee Can teach us something of His power.

Do not, as you value the health and happiness of those who sit at your table, place before them hot leavened bread or biscuit.

The Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen.