Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.

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.'

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.