Salman Rushdie quotes - page 9

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. (Salman Rushdie)
If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture. View quote
Salman Rushdie
In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she'd make mincemeat of you. View quote
Salman Rushdie
England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. (Salman Rushdie)
It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime. View quote
Salman Rushdie
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away. (Salman Rushdie)
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible. View quote
Salman Rushdie