Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
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I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
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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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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
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There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.
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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 don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.
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The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.
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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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Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
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Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
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England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
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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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I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.
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A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
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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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In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.