Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.

What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.