To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

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

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.