Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

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

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.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.