Hell is other people's fantasies.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.