Normally when I read, I don’t like music playing.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
One of the things I’ve thought about ‘Midnight’s Children’ is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
I don’t think people cry reading ‘Midnight’s Children,’ but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
If you have children, you worry about the world you’re leaving them.
In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
In television, the 60-minute series, ‘The Wire’ and ‘Mad Men’ and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
A man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?
She’s no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.