England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
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.
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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.
Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
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.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.