The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and no… - Salman Rushdie

I've got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don't. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don't have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there's a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it's as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.

[Since the fatwa of 1989, and not allowing it to affect his writings.] There was a moment when there was a 'me' floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was [...] "Evil." "Arrogant." "Terrible writer." "Nobody would've read him if there hadn't been an attack against his book." Et cetera. I've had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, "Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory."...
If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don't think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.

[On meeting E.M. Forster on several occasions while an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge] He was very encouraging when he heard that I wanted to be a writer [...] And he said something which I treasured, which is that he felt that the great novel of India would be written by somebody from India with a Western education.
I hugely admire A Passage to India, because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial [...] What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there's one thing that India is not, it's not cool. It's hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that's like that?