War is always a failure. It means we've failed in diplomacy and we've failed in talking to one another.

The road to freedom is bordered with sunflowers.

If we're being told to do stupid or cruel things, then it is morally correct to disobey.

When the world's run by fools it's the duty of intelligence to disobey.

Quentin Crisp said it to me; now I say it to you: say yes to everything.

Never fall for someone with a body to diet for.

I am the conscience of the 21st Century.

Calamitous collapse is better than mediocre defeat!

Different is not wrong.

Ageing is a privilege not a predicament.

Revolutions have always started in cafés.

So I sang out the barbarous words - karaoke from Hell.

There is within me a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction ...

I had an existential crisis at the Oscars, sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep, and being like, 'What am I doing here? I don't belong here'. I felt like it could all be taken away.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

You've got to listen to your body, notice some trends in yourself and do the best you can to be ready when a finish line approaches.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

The key to HIV/AIDS was to say let's give a patient multiple different therapies at the same time and that makes the virus much less likely to mutate.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.

The cars that our children and grandchildren will be driving in the future will be greener as a result of high-tech lessons learned.

Music is structure out of Chaos