September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I never stopped reading.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.