In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.