You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

Reality is a question of perspective.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.