There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.