Quotes from Salman Rushdie

I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.

The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.

I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

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

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

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

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

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