Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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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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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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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.
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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
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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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This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
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In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
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Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.
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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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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.
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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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The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.
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I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
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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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It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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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 Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
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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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I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.