America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around.

Non-violence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.