Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.... It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.... Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.