Actually, I don’t even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don’t like places where the noise is so loud you can’t talk to people.
When I’m writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call ‘supernaturalism.’ As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I’m writing about.
India is my kid sister.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Rohinton Mistry’s celebrated novel ‘Such a Long Journey’ was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
I’m a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I’ve had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
Doris Lessing really doesn’t care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn’t want that in her head. She’s going where she’s going, and that’s where she wants to go.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
I grew up reading ‘The Jungle Books’ and loving them.
I’m definitely post-something.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
Our lives teach us who we are.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
I’ve met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother’s father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.
If bigots behave like bigots, it’s not a huge surprise.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
In today’s U.S., it’s possible for almost anyone – women, gays, African-Americans, Jews – to run for, and be elected to, high office.
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there’s almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, ‘What do you think?’ I hope that you think well of it, obviously.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘How shall we live?’ And I would say I don’t need religion to answer those questions.
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
It’s true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I’m unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people’s lives.
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You’re all Muslim, so now you’re a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: ‘Oh no, we’re not.’
The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that’s happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can’t take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can’t face it head-on.
Everybody loves ‘The Wire,’ and I think it’s okay, but in the end it’s just a police series.
The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
I have had many more close women friends than men, and I’ve always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.
One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don’t try and burn the planet down.
