It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

I am a regular if not exactly enthusiastic patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.