Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

faith without doubt is addiction