But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.

I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.

At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.

My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically - not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that - but in the general sense.

But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists.

Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.

You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.

I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person.

Yeah, but in the end his followers take what they want from his philosophy. Maybe it doesn't matter what's going on in David Icke's mind. It's how other people take him.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.

I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

Success is always less funny than failure.

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

I mean the only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

I didn't have a boyfriend until I was 17. There were boys at school that I would find out later had a crush on me but I was too shy to talk to them.

As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn't effective unless you had a journal. That's about all I know.

And they talk about their bona fide doctors. They have a list of doctors that signed affidavits from looking at a picture of Terry. That's where they get their information from, by looking at a picture.

Of every ten persons who talk about you, nine will say something bad, and the tenth will say something good in a bad way.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Actually the copies of characters is something I don't particularly like to talk about in articles but just for your information, most characters there's only one.

I appreciate life, talk a lot, love to laugh, and am very optimistic.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

When I talk to people in need, they tell me they want to hope; they are eager for opportunity; they are ready for better days. And I can tell you that every time their hopes are disappointed, all nations lose.

Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.

The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.

I just have some restaurants to just go and eat there. Do mean places to watch people? I like to go shopping look for guitars and stuff with my friends. Look at Meyer, great old instruments, talk about pedals and stuff.

Where I come from, you don't really talk about how much you're earning. Those things are private. My dad never told my mum how much he was earning. I'm certainly not going to tell the world. I'm doing well.

I can't talk to a man who bears an undeserved animosity towards ferrets.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.

In my column series "The Main Thing," I often talk about how Internet technology can improve the way people communicate - both within a business and between a business and its customers and partners.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

I thought that I was going to have to pay them to do what I wanted to do, that was how much fun I was having. You're 20 years old and you're hanging out with rock stars and going to fabulous parties, and then you talk about it!