- I still refuse to call it 'Mumbai', as do many people who live there. It's not ancient like Delhi, with thousands of years of history. Essentially it's a city the British built because they thought the natural harbour would be useful to the navy. They reclaimed land to join together seven islands into what is now the peninsula of south Bombay, then they built a fort and the city grew around it.
- You can't be elected dog-catcher in America unless you're a Christian. For someone like me who spent a lot of his adult life in England and western Europe,it's probably the biggest single difference between the United States and the rest of the western democracies.
- Education changes the world. If you have generations of children being brought up in extremist madrasas to believe that that world view is the correct world view, then you create generations of people with built-in hostilities. Even if nothing had happened to exacerbate those hostilities, even if there had not been an Iraq war, the mindset of generations, particularly of young men, has been badly affected. You see that anti-semitism is taken for granted, and that a highly misogynistic world view is propagated, where the role of women is cast as secondary. And when you get to other issues like the treatment of religious minorities or sexual minorities, there's a fantastic hostility. So you're bringing up generations of bigoted children.
- [on a forced shutdown in Sri Lanka during the filming of 'Midnight's Children'] We lost two day's shooting and a lot of sleep. It's clear that there was somebody in the Iranian foreign ministry - I don't know who, and I don't know at how high a level it was, but someone - said to the Sri Lankan ambassador they they disapproved of the permission having been given [to film] and that it should be revoked. Fortunately Deepa [Mehta] as part of the process of planning the film, had personally been to see the president of Sri Lanka [as a project for]trying to develop the film industry in Sri Lanka, develop it as a location for filming, and that they saw this as being a kind of showcase for that. So they were very supportive of it.. The moment we got to the president's office he said, 'No,of course you must make your film'.
- [on how he managed to weather the storm over 'Satanic Verses'] Just by being bloody-minded. I think I'm tougher than I thought I was. One of the things...was that I just wanted to be myself... to keep writing books I wanted to write. I think, if you knew nothing about my life story, if you'd never seen anything about my life and all you had was my books to look at, there isn't a great rift in 1989. It's not that writing after that is radically different in the writing before that. I think [it] has its own continuity, and I've tried very hard to do that.
- The lessons learned at school are not necessarily those the school thinks it's teaching.
- The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
- I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force of liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. "Respect for religion" has become a code phrase meaning "fear of religion". Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect.
- [Comment on the Fatwa] I wish I'd written a more offensive book...
- [observation, 2017] I feel about England right now that it's like a family having a picnic on a railway track. "What's the problem? What's that hooting noise? Owls?" I mean, they don't seem to understand what's about to happen to them.
- I was in a yellow cab with a Sikh taxi driver who told me he was going to vote for Trump. And I said, "Why would you do a thing like that? He doesn't like people like you and me." And he said, "Oh, sir, Mr. Trump, he's a straight shooter, says what he thinks, doesn't give a fuck". And I thought, Oh, Trump's going to win.
- An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
- In order to understand one life, you have to swallow the World.
- Europe is in greater danger now than at any time in the last 70 years, and if one believes in that idea it's time to stand up and be counted. In the UK, I hope parliament may yet have the courage to call for a second referendum. That could rescue the country from the calamity of Brexit and go a long way towards rescuing the EU as well.
- People didn't like it. Because I should have died. Now that I've almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.
- I've always thought that my books are more interesting than my life. Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.
- The defence of free expression begins at the point at which somebody says something you don't like. It's a very simple thing, but it's being forgotten. That is what's enshrined in the first amendment ... In the US, you feel there's a younger generation that's kind of forgetting the value of that. Often, for reasons they would believe to be virtuous, they're prepared to suppress kinds of speech with which they don't sympathise. It's a slippery slope. And look out, because the person slipping down that slope could be you.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content