When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

faith without doubt is addiction

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

If you tend to a flower, it will bloom, no matter how many weeds surround it.

He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.

The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.

Sincerity and honesty carry one through many difficulties which all the arts he can invent would never help him through.

I don't know if anyone ever 'wins' a war.

Wherever Harry went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, he could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

I've been hit on plenty of times, mostly by men with little finesse who thought what was between their legs made up for what they lacked between their ears.

I've always got into stunts; even at drama school, I was falling down trap doors, and swinging in on ropes.