The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.

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.

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.

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

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.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.