If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.

The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated, which makes it all the more important to continue to deflate them. These are very courageous people around the world who poke fun from inside these societies. So, we now have to broaden the definition of what we mean by "writer" to include bloggers, cartoonists, song writers, visual artists - all these people are, in different ways, quite brave.