There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.
The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
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.
When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
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.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'
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.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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.
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
