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

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.