I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.

Security is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.

Jews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).

In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.