“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 as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse of the surrounding features.”

“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 ...”

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

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all hed ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were ...”

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.”

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

“Thought leadership is first and foremost life leadership.”

“More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“In what you say of another, apply the test of kindness, necessity and truth, and let nothing pass your lips without a 2/3 majority.”