We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

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

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.