Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
-
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 book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
-
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
-
When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
-
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.
-
British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
-
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
-
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
-
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
-
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
-
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
-
It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
-
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.
-
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
-
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-
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.
-
You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.
-
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.
-
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.