Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
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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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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
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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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When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
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Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
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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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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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Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
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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 hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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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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I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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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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 television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
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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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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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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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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.