"We face threats to freedom of expression if we are unable or unwilling to rise to the challenge of freedom of expression, when that freedom is exercised. We are all of us—especially those who gather at a book fair—quick to announce to the world that we’re champions of freedom of expression. But when we regard someone’s expression as offensive, why do we seek to silence them? Why is it not enough simply to condemn what they say as offensive and leave untouched their right to say it?"

“...Britain has a hugely inflated sense of self. ...”

“'An exile is a refugee with a library!'”

“Perhaps the elites run to a different beat of time.”

“...And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not to even wonder who would care if you did or if you didn't do this or that; and to find that the day's only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.”

“I wrote the Light of What We Know here .., over several long stays. I'm not sure where I would have written it otherwise. I've been homeless since 2007, all my few possessions put into storage before I set off to travel across Europe and Asia. My journey was interrupted because of the deaths of loved ones and it was within the interruption that I began and finished writing the novel. Yaddo, I was told, might be a good place to write. ... Yaddo turned out to suit me perfectly. A stately home—not English privilege but a Scooby Doo mansion—with woodlands, three lakes and magical charm, this charitable foundation has for a hundred years been host to giants such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath and Truman Capote. I'm still homeless and have yet to resume my broken travels, but wherever I go, I know that Yaddo and its 400-acre stretch of God's own country was always a kind of home to me and helped to nurture In the Light of What We Know.”

“...there is a virtue attached to intelligence, but lets suppose that we are all intelligent enough to know that intelligence is not a virtue; that the people who made the atom bomb were very intelligent, and that really virtue resides in how we conduct ourselves...”