Quotes from Salman Rushdie

I am not in the business of suppressing books.

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

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.

Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses.

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame."

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

The problem's name is God.

I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

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.

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.

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

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.