Salman Rushdie Quotes

Cruelty is not a literary value.

Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

American literature has always been immigrant.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.

It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.

To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'

It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.

[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.

That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

What kind of a god is it that's upset by a cartoon in Danish?

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.

If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.

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.

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.

One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.

Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.

Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.

I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.

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.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.