Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
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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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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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Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
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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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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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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
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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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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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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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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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The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
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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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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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 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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Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.