“While it did smash, breaking a bottle over someone’s head requires a lot more force than movies had led me to believe.”

“It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone — maybe even more alone — than I was…”

“I'd learned, though, that life isn't a movie. Though it's nice to believe in white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains, people are a lot more complex than that.”

“It's not what I expected," he said. "They're far more organized than our intelligence had led us to believe.”

“He "had developed a trick in college for speaking with authority. He believed that breaking his argument into numbers forced people to pay attention. How you said something could be more important than what you said.”

“Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grievous bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during the long intervals at Covent Garden, convinces me that theatre is safer than sport.”