Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

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.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.