What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

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

I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.