One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests, which has worked time and time again with PEN.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.

Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.