When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

Is birth always a fall?

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.