Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
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.
-
Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people.
-
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
-
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.
-
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
-
I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
-
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
-
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.
-
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
-
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.
-
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
-
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
-
It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
-
The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
-
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
-
We are the storytelling animal.
-
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
-
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
-
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
-
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
-
There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.