Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
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.
-
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
-
When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
-
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.
-
Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
-
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
-
I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
-
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
-
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.
-
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
-
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
-
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
-
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.
-
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
-
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.
-
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am not in the business of suppressing books.
-
Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
-
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
-
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.
-
I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
-
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.