We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

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.

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.

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

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.