Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

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.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

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.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.