You don't just - you often have to defend the freedoms of people you don't like, you know, whose work you don't like, because freedom of speech is not just for serious people. It's also for trashy people. So, and, unfortunately, this is at the trashy end of the scale.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.