(1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent
. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western worlds.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses
(1988), was the centre of a major controversy
, drawing protests from Muslim
s in several countries.
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something.