Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
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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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The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
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Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
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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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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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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.
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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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The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
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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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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
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Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
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I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.
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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
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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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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.