Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Nothing is unfilmable.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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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 people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
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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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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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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.
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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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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
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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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You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
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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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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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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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I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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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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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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Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
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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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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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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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The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
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A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
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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.