Salman Rushdie Quotes
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When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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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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All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
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The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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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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You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
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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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When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
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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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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.
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I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
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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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Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
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The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
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I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
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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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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
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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.
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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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.