The only position when violence is threatened in response to a novel or a cartoon or a crappy YouTube video is a no-surrender position. This is how we live. We live in a country in which we have these rights, and we're not going to give them up. Full stop. The end.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

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

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.