Salman Rushdie Quotes

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.

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.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

The problem's name is God.

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

Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate 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.

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

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

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

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 country.

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.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

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.

If you're offended, it's your problem.

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.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

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

I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

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

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

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.

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

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."

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.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.