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.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.