“How should wordspresume themselves as bandages and slingswhen the world limps onward, and you've darkened it?And words be damned, for if we're 'gentle men'then what hope does the world have? Words are lost.They've plucked their eyes out rather than see this,have jumped from clifftops.”

“We will discover nothing if we bind ourselves to accepted wisdoms. Questioning is necessary for discovery.”

“What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have.”

“...Everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further-I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever felt myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything... needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to even know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting.”

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.”

“I was just not cut out to be an American journalist. In England, I could phone my editor and say 'Do you want an interview with X?' and get an immediate yes or no. At Vanity Fair I had to 'pitch ideas' and then go through layers of editors, all of whom asked what my 'angle' was going to be. I have always deeply hated and resented this question. If you have an angle on someone, it means you have already decided what to write before you meet, so you really might as well not bother interviewing them" (126).”

“No matter how big the challenge, you can really only do the next little bit of it.”