There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.
Of course the barbarians' aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.
I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don't like that. I listen to everything.
It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.
The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.
The hardest part of 'Game of Thrones' is there is so much incredible talent bouncing off the walls that you'll actually miss some of them, and not getting it is very intimidating.
First scenes are super-important to me. I'll spend months and months pacing and climbing the walls trying to come up with the first scene. I drive for hours on the freeway.
Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls.
I'm communicating with the directors of the Soviet companies, and I see that it is wrong, but when I go to the official discussions, they discuss we should change the color of the walls.
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
I threw away the whole of my working history, my photograph albums, diaries and stage clothes. Shoving big, ugly discs on walls is a bit like rubbing people's faces in it, saying 'I am considerably richer than you.' It is completely unnecessary.
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.
When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
