Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.