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.
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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.
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...