“As a matter of fact I had a terribly traumatic childhood. But afterward I sort of reraised myself.”

“Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?”

“Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: this can’t be happening to me.”

“When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, the way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren't sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: "Be home by ten, okay?”

“Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. ”

“The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good. ”

“There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.”