The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.