Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.