Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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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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I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she'd make mincemeat of you.
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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'
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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
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People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
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This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
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I'm definitely post-something.
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.
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In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
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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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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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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.