Salman Rushdie Quotes

In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

Terror is glamour - not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

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.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

Home is the place where you feel happy.

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

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.

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer.

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.