The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

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.

When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.