Salman Rushdie Quotes
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All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
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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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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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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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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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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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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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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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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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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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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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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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I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.
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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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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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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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The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
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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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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.