They said it in September

"When you’ve worked hard and done well and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you."
Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention (Time, September 17)

"It was a deal worked out over dinner on the kitchen table. I made three dollars on this film, but they’re worth it."
Author Salman Rushdie on the film adaptation of his best-selling novel Midnight’s Children, which was screened recently at a film festival in Colorado (Outlook, September 17)

"The opening of organised retail to foreign investment will benefit our farmers. According to the regulations we have introduced, those who bring FDI have to invest 50 percent of their money in building new warehouses, cold-storages, and modern transport systems. This will help to ensure that a third of our fruits and vegetables, which at present are wasted because of storage and transit losses, actually reach the consumer."
Prime minister Manmohan Singh in a televised address to the nation (September 21)

"Across Asia, including China, foreign retailers have proved a blessing, providing consumers with cheaper wares, and upgrading the technology of local producers to make them globally competitive. Only in India do opposition parties want to protect the aam bania against the aam admi."
Swaminathan Aiyar on the opposition to the government’s decision to allow foreign direct investment in retail (Times of India, September 25)

"In India the literary novel is greeted with derision or silence by book reviewers, expected to produce 800 words and given a day to do it. I suppose they must be excused for the shoddy, the half-baked and the uncomprehending."
Jeet Thayil, whose novel Narcopolis has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize (Times of India, September 28)

"There’s no part of me that represented myself as your children’s babysitter. I’m a writer and will write what I want to write."
J.K. Rowling at the new release of The Casual Vacancy, her new novel for adults (New Yorker)