This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

We all started playing football against our best friends, and I can't remember a moment where, because it was my best friend, I did not want to win against him.

We are going to extend our frank hand to seek a relation of friendship - I repeat - of cooperation with the United States.

The biggest problem is integrating people from countries with Islamic agrarian cultures. They don't share with us the core values of modernity and think quite differently about relationships between women and men and individual responsibility.

You're going to be way happier doing what you actually love and finding other people that love the same thing than doing something that other people love so you're just cooler and you have cool friends.