Salman Rushdie Quotes
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It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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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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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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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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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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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 will come back to India - so deal with it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
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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 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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Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.