Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
-
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
-
If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
-
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
-
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
-
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.
-
Cruelty is not a literary value.
-
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
-
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
-
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.
-
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
-
Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
-
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
-
Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
-
The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
-
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.