Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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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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India is my kid sister.
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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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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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Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
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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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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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You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.
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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 hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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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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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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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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Originality is dangerous.
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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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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
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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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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 Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
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Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.