The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.