Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
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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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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
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The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
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If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
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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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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 I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
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The world is always terrible.
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I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
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In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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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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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
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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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What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.