Search the Archive

"...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 b…"

"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 …"

"...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 intellige…"

"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 a…"

"Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward."

"When we encounter a face, we view it as a whole, by a process of integration of the parts, which takes place, as some scientists and physicians understand it, in the optic nerves long before any trans…"

"I oscillate between loathing Vladimir Nabokov ’s novels and loving them. This morning, I can’t stand a word of his fiction. But Nabokov’s “Letters to Vera” is not fiction. The showing off, such as the…"

"We shore up our prejudices with selected facts..."

"Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, …"

"I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I re…"