Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
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It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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.
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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.
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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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The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
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Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
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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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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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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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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.
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
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The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.
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Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
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If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
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In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
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One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
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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.
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
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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.