Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'
-
Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
-
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
-
Nothing is unfilmable.
-
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
-
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.
-
The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
-
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
-
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
-
There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
-
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
-
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.
-
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
-
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
-
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
-
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
-
I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.
-
It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
-
If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-
Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
-
Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.