“Compared with how we’ve ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees – far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.”

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

Because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

To bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today’s globe.

It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?

The Lord authoritatively announced, “That dot represents all the evil of all beings and of all history combined. It’s temporary and fleeting compared to Who I Am. So what are you going to magnify?”

Standing even for a short time proves exhausting compared with walking and running though it be for a long time … Nature delights and is restored by alternating and varied actions.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

A thorn in the flesh is nothing compared to a thorn in the conscience.

The Mafia and crime bosses of this world are amateurs compared to this syndicate.

Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.

Prison’s a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.