What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

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 inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]

My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.