"Muslim religious leaders — from Al-Azhar in Cairo to local imams throughout the world - need to say exactly what Pope Francis said to the Catholic members of the Mafia: ‘Any Muslim who commits an act of terror — that is, deliberately murders civilians of any nationality or religion — goes to hell."

"She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature--that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess."

"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."

"Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones."

"If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations."

"Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one."

"A man stroking a dog’s head means the universe is stroking the universe; a child playing with a little dog means the universe is playing with the universe! If the universe is a theatre play, then we can be sure that there is only one player: The universe itself! Everything we see is the same player!"

"And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended."