Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.

Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.

Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.

I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers.

When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has been a return of racism in the guise of "antiterrorism." People who look like myself are immediately suspect. I've become extremely self-conscious about going into crowded public places.

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.