To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.