I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
— Salman Rushdie
If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
The world is always terrible.
I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
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.
When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
American literature has always been immigrant.
This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
I will come back to India - so deal with it.
The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
India is my kid sister.
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
Cruelty is not a literary value.
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
