Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

American literature has always been immigrant.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.