Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

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

Hell is other people's fantasies.