Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
-
When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
-
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
-
There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
-
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
-
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
-
Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
-
Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
-
You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
-
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
-
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
-
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
-
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
-
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
-
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.