Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

Is birth always a fall?

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.