Salman Rushdie Quotes
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What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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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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Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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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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In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
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I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
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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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Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
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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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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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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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The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
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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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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 write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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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.