I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses.

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.