Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.

To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.