We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

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

I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.