There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

I grew up kissing books and bread.

If you're offended, it's your problem.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I didn't become a writer to write about me.

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

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

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.