Salman Rushdie Quotes
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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.
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If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
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What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
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We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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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.
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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
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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.
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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.
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Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
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It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
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England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
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The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
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The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.
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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.
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The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.