A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
Salman Rushdie
I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
American literature has always been immigrant.
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.
Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
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.
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.
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.
British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
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 Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
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.
I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
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.
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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.
