Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

I grew up kissing books and bread.

The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine,' Rushdie says. 'Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.

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

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.