Rushdiespeak

"If a novelist is smart, he or she will realise the novel is not an ivory tower form. It's a form which requires what people are getting up to, what's really going on in their heads - how they think and feel - if you don't know that you can't write about it. The bolder you make your range of experience, the richer your work will be..."

"One of the things that happened in the wake of modernism is that you wound up with popular fiction which told great page-turning stories, but had no other qualities. And you had the so-called literary novel, which had all those other virtues, but didn't tell a story."

On celebrity: "The only thing it's good for now is getting tables in restaurants."

And on his proposed next novel after Shalimar The Clown: "I am trying to develop an idea...which I've had for quite some time. It would be a historical novel in which I imagine a connection between the millennial empire of India and Rome. I'd be creating an imaginary ambassador who would bring India and Machiavellian Florence into collision with each other."

- From a recent profile/interview in today's online edition of The Scotsman, which can be read here.