English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

A book is not completed till it's read.

I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.