Salman Rushdie Quotes
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If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
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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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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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In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
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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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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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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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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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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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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The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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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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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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It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
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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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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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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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In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.
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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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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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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.