Realism Can Break A Writer's Heart.

What Happened In Pakistan Was That People Were Told: You're All Muslim, So Now You're A Country. As We Saw In 1971 With The Bangladesh Secession, The Answer To That Was: 'oh No, We're Not.'

When A Reader Falls In Love With A Book, It Leaves Its Essence Inside Him, Like Radioactive Fallout In An Arable Field, And After That There Are Certain Crops That Will No Longer Grow In Him, While Other, Stranger, More Fantastic Growths May Occasionally Be Produced.

The Koran Was Revealed At A Time Of Great Change In The Arab World, The Seventh-century Shift From A Matriarchal Nomadic Culture To An Urban Patriarchal System.

It Is Literature Which For Me Opened The Mysterious And Decisive Doors Of Imagination And Understanding. To See The Way Others See. To Think The Way Others Think. And Above All, To Feel.

As Though She Had Entered A Fable, As Though She Were No More Than Words Crawling Along A Dry Page, Or As Though She Were Becoming That Page Itself, That Surface On Which Her Story Would Be Written And Across Which There Blew A Hot And Merciless Wind, Turning Her Body To Papyrus, Her Skin To Parchment, Her Soul To Paper.