Free speech is life itself.

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

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.