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.

Terror is glamour - not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

We are the storytelling animal.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.