I was living in New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks. And I remember, you know, in those weeks that followed, when none of us spoke about anything else really, a number of friends of mine, people I knew, including very experienced journalists, I heard them saying things like, well, now we understand what happened to you.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.