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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The world is a very abnormal place.
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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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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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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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 idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
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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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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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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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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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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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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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The world is always terrible.
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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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Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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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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The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
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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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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.