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

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.