Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve.
You can’t judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now.
I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.