God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-fo… - Salman Rushdie

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

[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?

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.