It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

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

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.