Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
-
In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.
-
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.
-
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
-
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
-
When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
-
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
-
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.
-
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
-
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.
-
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
-
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.
-
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
-
If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
-
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.