People perish. Books are immortal.

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it – whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of...

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had...

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere… – Pg. 82

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much...

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book...

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.

The only thing you can be sure of, Herr March, is that – whoever wins – still standing when the smoke of battle clears will be the banks of the cantons of Switzerland.

…it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre…

Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying...

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. – Pg. 195

What fascinates people isn’t policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person’s life.

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet...

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence...

And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop.