A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.
In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.
When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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.
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
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.
Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she'd make mincemeat of you.
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.
England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.
Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
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.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.