The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.