You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.

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.

There's going to be no more compromise on issues where there should not be compromise. Enough with appeasement or apology and mollifying, all that. To hell with all that. I'm just going to fight my corner.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.