Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
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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.
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
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If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.
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Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
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Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
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There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
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I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
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If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
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Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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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.
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There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
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Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.