I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

optimism is a disease

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.