Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

Reality is a question of perspective.

In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.