It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.