Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
-
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.
-
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
-
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.
-
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
-
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.
-
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
-
The world is a very abnormal place.
-
I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
-
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.
-
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
-
I'm definitely post-something.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
American literature has always been immigrant.
-
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
-
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
-
When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
-
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
-
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.
-
If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
-
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
-
The world is always terrible.
-
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.