When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.