I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

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