Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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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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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
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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 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 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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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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If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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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 only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
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The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.
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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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The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
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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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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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In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
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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 sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.