Salman Rushdie Quotes

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

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.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

optimism is a disease

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

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.

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.

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.

I did a lot of student acting when I was young.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.