The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
— Salman Rushdie
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.
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.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
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.
In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
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.
It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
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.
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
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.
The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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, obviously.
The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
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.
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
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.
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.
