Salman Rushdie Quotes
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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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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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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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
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I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
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You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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.
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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 did a lot of student acting when I was young.
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
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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?
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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.'
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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.
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The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.