Salman Rushdie Quotes

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.

~ Salman Rushdie

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.

~ Salman Rushdie

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

~ Salman Rushdie

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

~ Salman Rushdie

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

~ Salman Rushdie

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

~ Salman Rushdie

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

~ Salman Rushdie

If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.

~ Salman Rushdie

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.

~ Salman Rushdie

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

~ Salman Rushdie

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

~ Salman Rushdie

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

~ Salman Rushdie

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.

~ Salman Rushdie

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

~ Salman Rushdie

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

~ Salman Rushdie

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

~ Salman Rushdie

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.

~ Salman Rushdie

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.

~ Salman Rushdie

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

~ Salman Rushdie

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.

~ Salman Rushdie

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

~ Salman Rushdie