Jonathan Raban Quotes

The mythical America…that marvellous, heroic, sentimental land-was an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer’s leap over the rude facts at your feet.

If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.

The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.

When I want an opinion, I’ll get it from my peers – from men of vision, like our great railroad builders… Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore… fellows with imaginations broad enough to span the continent.

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ is Jimmy Carter’s short campaign autobiography, ‘Why Not the Best?,’ published in 1975.