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.

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

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

My dad was in the Army, so what was happening internationally and nationally was always important to my family.

I don't know what it's like to be Cuban-American, but I know what it's like to have family under Communism and to get up early in the morning and send medical supplies and try to send food and try to send money and have it intervened, and them calling and crying on the phone.

When I was growing up, my father helped kindle my passion for innovation and technology. He was a high-ranking executive at AT&T and used our family dinner table as a focus group.

I'm happy with who I am inside. I'd hate to have accolades and all that and not really be happy with who I was. So I'm really thankful for my family and for the support system that I have for being the person that I am today. I'm proud of who I am.