Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
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Originality is dangerous.
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Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
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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.
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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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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
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Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
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In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.
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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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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.
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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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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
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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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If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
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Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
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I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.
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You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.