Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.