Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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.
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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 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 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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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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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
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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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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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 never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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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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One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
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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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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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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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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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All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
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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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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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Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
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If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
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The world is a very abnormal place.
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.