You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, "How do you face up to violence?" And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That I think is valuable. In terms of actually tweeting myself, I have just lost enthusiasm for it. Maybe I'll do some of it this week to tell people about the PEN Festival and encourage them to show up.

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.