Salman Rushdie Quotes
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The world is always terrible.
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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 world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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 world is a very abnormal place.
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There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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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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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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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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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 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 only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
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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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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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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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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.
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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 never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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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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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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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.