Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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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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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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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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I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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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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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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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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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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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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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Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
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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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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 do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.