In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.