Top 667 Quotes & Sayings by Salman Rushdie - Page 2

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

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.

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.

Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.

In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.

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

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

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.

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.

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

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.

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

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

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.

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.

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.

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

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

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

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

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

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

It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.

I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

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

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

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

Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

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.

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

Originality is dangerous.

I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.

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

I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.

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

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

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

The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

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