Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.

The problem's name is God.

Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.