Salman Rushdie

“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.”

“American literature has always been immigrant.”

“When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.”

“It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.”

“If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.”

“And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then”

“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.”

“I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.”

“My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.”

“A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.”

“Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.”

“I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.”

“Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.”

“If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.”

“I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.”

“When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.”

“It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.”

“The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.”

“The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.”

“Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.”