Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I finally got to the last one, it didn't take much time.

What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure.

No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occasional assertions of literary and moral authority.

I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness.

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.