Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of...

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation...

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time’s records before long.

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of...

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he’d told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to...

…that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance,...

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars...

Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his...

Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born. ‘There are no strings...

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well,...

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Unless, of course, there’s no such thing as chance;…in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror...

Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny....

Death and life were just adjacent verandas.

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