Salman Rushdie Quotes
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
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Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
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If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Cruelty is not a literary value.
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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
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The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
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At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
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Nothing is unfilmable.