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.

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.

Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn’t look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that’s completely typical of Seattle....

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

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he...

Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks.

No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.

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

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

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

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and...

Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.

‘Dreams From My Father’ reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they’re dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence,...

The only nation I’ve ever been tempted to feel really racist about are the Swiss – a whole country of phobic hand washers living in a giant Barclays Bank

‘Rage’ is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it’s true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events...

I’ve taught the better class of tourist both to see and not to see; to lift their eyes above and beyond the inessentials, and thrill to our western Nature in her majesty.

There’s an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of...

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.

It’s been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack...

My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front

Seattle is this curious liberal ‘island.’

Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue (in the American, not the British, sense) as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey’s fits and starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel,...

The north-south line of ‘the mountains,’ meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.

Simply as a writer of books I’m thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the...

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The...

By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle...

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ is Jimmy Carter’s short campaign autobiography, ‘Why Not the Best?,’ published in 1975.

Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia,...

When I want an opinion, I’ll get it from my peers – from men of vision, like our great railroad builders… Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore… fellows with imaginations broad enough to span the continent.