You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.