England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.

When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.

After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.

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.

When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.