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.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

Reality is a question of perspective.