We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I didn't become a writer to write about me.

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

We all owe death a life.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.