Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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I'm definitely post-something.
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I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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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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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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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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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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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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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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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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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.