The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.