[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]

I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.

My heart broke open and history fell in.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.