Words matter. These are the best Salman Rushdie Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
Memory is a way of telling you what’s important to you.
War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody’s in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, ‘anti-American,’ and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian ‘terrorism.’
I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character.
It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,’ but the moment you threaten violence in return, you’ve taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
You want all your books to stick around after you’ve gone.
If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
When I was writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
I’m a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
I saw Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained,’ and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don’t like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino’s violence is actually funny.
If you have children, you worry about the world you’re leaving them.
In television, the 60-minute series, ‘The Wire’ and ‘Mad Men’ and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
When people do the cowardly thing, it’s not about respect, it’s about fear.
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
I’ve never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
You don’t fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.
I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
I don’t like books that play to the gallery, but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
There was a series called ‘Game of Thrones’ which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage – because there’s lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it’s kind of fun.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I’m not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
The frustrating part of being tagged ‘controversial’ is people go looking for trouble where there isn’t any to look for.
But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
One of the things I’ve thought about ‘Midnight’s Children’ is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
I’m not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they’re on the news. That, I think, is valuable.
I’m a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It’s not just what I like. It’s what I write about.
In writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
There are two things in Indian history – one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential – for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
When I’m writing a book, sentence by sentence, I’m not thinking theoretically. I’m just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I’ve got.
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
I was 21 in 1968, so I’m as much a child of the ’60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it’s worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve.
Originality is dangerous.
I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
American literature has always been immigrant.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
It’s obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody’s work.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both – usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
