Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.