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 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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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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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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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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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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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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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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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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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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I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.
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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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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 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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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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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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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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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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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
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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.
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The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.