To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. - Salman Rushdie

"I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And as a result there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? You're kind of nobody or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think that whole business defining yourself by anger is very problematic. And then the fact that we all kind of bend over backwards not to induce that anger becomes very often also a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don't like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, but to say "I don't like that much" and then get on with the next business."

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not
very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a
hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.