Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.

I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.

Rejection is the one constant of human experience.

You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other's opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow.

Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.

I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.

To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company.

People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.

You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.'

People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.

No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.

I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I've never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.

Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?

The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.

'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.

In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.

If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone.

There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.

I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.

The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually.

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.

It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.

Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.

The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.

Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change.

The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.

I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.

Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.

The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous.

For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.

We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.

The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal.

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last.