I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

There's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.