You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.
I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around forever.
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‘reader.’
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
War is what happens when language fails.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
I’m bad at picking heroes.
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
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