Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.

When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

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.