Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.

The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were.

We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away.

It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will.

I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day .

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.

In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched.

Also, everyone thinks they know Candide - you hear people described as 'Panglossian'. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar.

I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am.

But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.

There are three things that a beggar and a rich person share every day: the sun, the moon, and the stars.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

We have had too much of the Clintons, too much of the establishment, too much of Bushes. We have had too much of the old names and the old theories. It's time for a new theory.

Promise me you will appreciate every moment because we are the lucky ones

He would have lied to himself as facilely as an alcoholic lies to himself to justify the 10 a.m. tumbler of vodka : it may be early here, but in Baghdad it's almost evening.

Sometimes brothers are in war with each other, but at the end love conquers all.