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

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.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

I will work tirelessly to ensure our public lands are managed and preserved in a way that benefits everyone for generations to come.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

I buy records - vinyl. I have a record player at home.

I think every little girl is fascinated with mermaids.

I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.

The nation will benefit in the long term if it continues to be open to foreign expertise. This will help the country to establish its business culture and environment faster, based on international best practice.

I definitely feel like I had a different upbringing to a lot of other people, but not in a bad - or good - way.

I have always been intrigued with singing and I actually started my career in musical comedies.

Life and death. At some point we're gonna leave this world. Do I know when? Absolutely not.

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

Wallace and Gromit's contraptions are created purely for gags, but we all have the urge to invent - especially children. If they're bored, kids will make something from cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots, tape and elastic bands. Often, those constructions are the best.

The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the goverment.

Scientology is much more accepted in Hollywood than Jesus.

My brother Van got the computer first and showed me what it was like to edit video. I definitely credit Van with turning me onto filmmaking.

Leisure is time for doing something useful this leisure the diligent man will obtain but the lazy man never.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

I really wanted to be a writer.

When you make a great record, it's around forever.

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.

I discovered that what most people call creepy, scary, and spooky, I call comfy, cozy, and home.

I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.