The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine,' Rushdie says. 'Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.