I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.