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.

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.

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.

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.

I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.