‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

American literature has always been immigrant.