Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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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.
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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
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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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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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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 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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American literature has always been immigrant.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
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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.
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I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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.
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.