I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
Choice. It's the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It's the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It's the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend. It's the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
We have free elections. Everybody can vote, we fought for that, we brag about that and we know we're going to have a winner and we're going to have a loser.
We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.