Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

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.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.