Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
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The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
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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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I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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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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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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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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Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
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Originality is dangerous.
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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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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 sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
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The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
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There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
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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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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.