I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

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