Past mistakes cannot create a present pain; no mistake in life has the power to make us ache any more than the echo of someone crying can shed tears.
I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.
But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.
. . . much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions. Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.
In my kind of reporting work, you don't parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It's the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals' lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.
At the weekend, one of the paparazzi left their lunch box filled with half-eaten pasta salad on my doorstep: it was like a little warning, you know? 'We have been here. '
Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom and behold it, as it were, for the first time.
The Philippines are a very important - I have many, many friends from the Philippines. They're great people. The Philippines strategically is very important to us. I think we'll have a great relationship with the Philippines. I think it's strategically very important to do so.