It's not like being a writer is a very lucrative career, but you know, you just know when you've found what you're really meant to do.

When I was 26 or 27, I took a year off before I was going to get my Ph.D. in geography and started traveling. And within a month, I said, 'I don't want to be academic. I want to write fiction.' And as soon as I said that - 'I'm going to write fiction' - everything in my life started to make sense.

Poverty is just a word. I mean, how do you dismantle capitalism? It's through small actions. It's through breaking down poverty as a lived experience of not enough food, of your health not being good. So those are things that we can actually work on without ever having to call a politician.

I think we sometimes forget that we have so many other places to create change. My dad taught me this, but the political is one spot to make change. But so is writing a book.

I've been proud to be the chair of the Stop the War coalition, proud to be associated with the Stop the War coalition.

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.

The difference between the Bush I war against Iraq and the Bush II war against Iraq is that in the first one, we appealed to the sentiments and interests of the different groupings in the region and had them with us. In the second one, we did it on our own, on the basis of false premises, with extremely brutality and lack of political skill.

Al-Qa'ida is the antithesis of the peace, tolerance and humanity that is at the heart of Islam.