The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

Vulnerability of artists is definitely what makes organizations like PEN necessary because, as I tried to argue, the actual work that writers and artists do has an ornery way of surviving. Particularly in this age of the internet, it is very easy for forbidden work to be found online somewhere if you know where to look. Artists themselves, however, are in increasing danger, and not just artists. The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.