“Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.”

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

It is important not to trust people too much.

Writing has to support itself.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

The church has historically been very slow to embrace technology. Until very recently, their idea of a laptop was an altar boy.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

During the Depression, or back when we were fighting Hitler, people didn’t have time to sue a company if the coffee was too hot. There were urgent, pressing problems. If you think you have it tough, read history books.

Black history won’t stop no bullets.

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

Grace can and does have a history.

There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.