Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.