Hell is other people's fantasies.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.