All names mean something.

No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.

The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

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

I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.