Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman’s truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman’s truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest...

Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima.

Basque is one of the world’s more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words – profanities, I assume.

There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster’s guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city.

The language of economics is seldom limpid, but in H Street they usually manage to remove from it the very last flickering colophon of charm.

Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.

Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, halfway between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, in such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming.

I told him everything and it was from him that I learned what my future would be.