There's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.

I will come back to India - so deal with it.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.