Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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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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One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
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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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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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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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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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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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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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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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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I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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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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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Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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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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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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We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
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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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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
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In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.