Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

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

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.