Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.