One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.

Realism can break a writer's heart.