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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
Salman Rushdie -
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie -
Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
Salman Rushdie -
Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
Salman Rushdie -
In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Salman Rushdie -
One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Salman Rushdie -
Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
We are the storytelling animal.
Salman Rushdie -
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
Salman Rushdie