“I don't think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recordin...”

“...he is thinking about thoughts; so many thoughts piled up, such a quantity of half-remembered knowledge, so many emotions brought up from the well to spill out: the unrolling of history - a river...”

“It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was deni...”

“Personally, I have detested Gordon Brown since the moment in 2001 when he tried to make cheap capital out of the Laura Spence affair; as his troubles have piled up, I have felt no sympathy for him ...”

“In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely ...”

“A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.”

“A true success is when you become a reason for a Smile on their face.”

“You've got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.”

“You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.”