I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.