Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
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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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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
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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.
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In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
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I am not in the business of suppressing books.
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I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.
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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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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.
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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.
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
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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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The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.
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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.