Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
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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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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.
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In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
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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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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
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People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
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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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I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
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Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
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The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
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At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
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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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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
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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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I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
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Cruelty is not a literary value.
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In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.