Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.
I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.
One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.