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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Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Salman Rushdie

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Salman Rushdie

A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

Salman Rushdie

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

Salman Rushdie

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascina...

Salman Rushdie

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

Salman Rushdie

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympath...

Salman Rushdie

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 ...

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