When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

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

We are the storytelling animal.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.