Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

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.

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

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.

I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.

People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.