A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.

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.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'