Quoted: “The antidote to Puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings,” Kureishi wrote in the title essay of “The Word and the Bomb.” He added: “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination.”

quoted: “effective multiculturalism”: not a superficial exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely — an encounter with human desires in all their complexity. Or, as he wrote, “a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict, which is worth enduring, rather than a war.”