Quotes from Salman Rushdie

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

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

American literature has always been immigrant.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

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.

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it... they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them.

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.