Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
Why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?
Science fiction is where I started out, really. When I was a kid, I was a complete addict of science fiction. It was one of my earliest interests as a writer, and I’ve just taken a long time to circle back around to it.
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable.
Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
The problem’s name is God.
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.
My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.
The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.
I grew up kissing books and bread.
What kind of God is it who’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.