Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
-
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
-
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
-
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
-
I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
-
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.
-
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
-
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
-
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
-
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.
-
It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
-
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?
-
We are the storytelling animal.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.