Salman Rushdie Quotes

Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.

If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.

I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.

Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.

I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.

I beat my sons in real-life table tennis, but virtually, I get murdered. I download games on the iPhone that I'm addicted to - I'm a master at "Angry Birds."

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.

I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.

It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.The problem’s name is God.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own, ' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

But great tragedy is universal

The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.

She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own

History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.

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

It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.

This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

The self was both its origins and its journey.

A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Did you know, ji, ’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.