Salman Rushdie Quotes
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
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I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
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I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
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As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
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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.
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
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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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Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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Cruelty is not a literary value.
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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.
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You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
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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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Nothing is unfilmable.
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'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
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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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When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
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British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
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I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.