Salman Rushdie Quotes
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.
Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.