Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new. - Salman Rushdie

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.