I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.