In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.