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.
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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.
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.
The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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.
The world is a very abnormal place.
If you're offended, it's your problem.
Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
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 West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
Cruelty is not a literary value.
The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.
The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
