Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists for instance take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority then we would be more open to slavery to the subjugation of women to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms.

What made women's labour particularly attractive to the capitalists was not only its lower price but also the greater submissiveness of women.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

The truth is I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks so we have to carve out our own niche and to me that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

I don't trust a lot of journalists.

The time has come for all evangelists to practice full financial disclosure. The world is watching how we walk and how we talk. We must have the highest standards of morality ethics and integrity if we are to continue to have influence.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics sports culture and crime and write it up on deadline.

In emerging democracies like Russia in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property.

I mean Britain is a country of successful Muslim businesspeople teachers and educators journalists. So we have to say very strongly that the two million plus Muslims in Britain the vast bulk of them make a huge contribution to our society and they actually make it the vibrant society it is.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

Yes all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society God has been relegated to the margin to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position back to center stage.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

The idealists will always be in society and we will survive.

The smarter the journalists are the better off society is. For to a degree people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher the better the student body.

In short it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.

Beyond that I seem to be compelled to write science fiction rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature both fiction and nonfiction.

When I started in the business there was a thing called adult fantasy but nobody quite knew what it was and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

Here in the United States our profession is much maligned people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad.