Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hebdo … but the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

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.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.