When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

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

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair".... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

In today's US, it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.