Quotes by Salman Rushdie

About Salman Rushdie:

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.
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...what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagine...

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obvious...

Salman Rushdie

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Salman Rushdie

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

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.

Salman Rushdie

Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random...

Salman Rushdie

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

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. Instea...

Salman Rushdie

It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.

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.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

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

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

Salman Rushdie

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the worl...

Salman Rushdie

American literature has always been immigrant.

Salman Rushdie

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.

Salman Rushdie

You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.

Salman Rushdie

Author Bio

  • NameSalman Rushdie
  • DescriptionBritish Indian novelist and essayist
  • BornJune 19, 1947
  • CountryIndia
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • AwardsCommandeur Des Arts Et Des Lettres?; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; PEN Pinter Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award