I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.