Salman Rushdie Quotes

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.

For me, what I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

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.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

India is my kid sister.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.

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

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

A book is not completed till it's read.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

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.

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.

And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?

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.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.

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

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

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

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'

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

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests, which has worked time and time again with PEN.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.

All names mean something.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.

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.

There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.

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

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

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.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.

The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

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