I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... [But] it's very hard to write about real events. It becomes unbearable. The challenge in writing this book was: how do you write about these things bearably without sweetening the pill?
Salman Rushdie
Related I was a bad guy. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was ho... JAMES FREY Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I ac... ANITA DESAI I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens. MEG ROSOFF Sometimes, I feel able to write lines about my life and about how I do feel everyday in such a huge ... SARAH KEDDAR I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it. HILAIRE BELLOC All of it made me think about this book I want to write. It's about greed. JOHN DENSMORE The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time... JAMES ROLLINS For years I've wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I... KATE GRENVILLE I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this. O. J. SIMPSON I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at. KATE ADIE It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right t... PHILIP PULLMAN This is the book I was always meant to write, TRUMAN CAPOTE The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book wr... CHUCK KLOSTERMAN A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ... MAUREEN JOHNSON I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand peop... ANN HOOD So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like ... JOHN IRVING Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to wri... MALCOLM COWLEY Be kind and considerate with your criticism. . . . It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to... MALCOLM COWLEY It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning t... DYLAN MORAN Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell - that's the hard part. JAY TAYLOR I write about personal experiences. I write about things that have happened to me and the people aro... JAMES BAY I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't k... JACKIE COLLINS Yankee Stadium. Things go on here. You can write a book about it. ANDY PETTITTE Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made... HARUKI MURAKAMI In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to b... JUNOT DíAZ When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big ... JUDY BLUME 'Tis easy to write epigrams nicely but to write a book is hard MARCUS AURELIUS Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to... MALCOLM COWLEY I always run into these Ph.D.s. They write and write and write about sustainable development. Then t... JAIME LERNER If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA In my twenties, it was so important for me to show people I had all these other books and these othe... EVELYN LAU Never think you can't do something. I definitely never thought I could write a book, and even af... CONNOR FRANTA I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write ab... OCTAVIA E. BUTLER I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time. CHARLAINE HARRIS You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line. MAGGIE STIEFVATER No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always f... CASSANDRA CLARE One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I... JOHN BURNSIDE I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me WALTER RALEIGH SR. I am what I have ever read BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The world would have been a better place if some men had just shut their mouths. BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA A writer is a thought smith; he educates men to think for themselves BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them w... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Able writers let us into their minds and show us how they think and by that open our minds to oursel... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Sometimes I have a good idea, something I wish I could remember, and instead of writing it down, com... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA [So far, the relief effort could be described as] somewhat organized chaos, ... Nobody wrote a book ... GENE GREEN You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown... MADELEINE L'ENGLE You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown... MADELEINE L'ENGLE A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childh... TEA OBREHT How long it takes to write a book depends on its length. WALTER JON WILLIAMS For me, it's actually really hard to write about my real experience. Like to do a Taylor Swift. ... ZARA LARSSON I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feel... COREY HAIM I then plan to seclude myself and write a book about my experience, ERIC LATHAM I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple m... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I ... EVE BUNTING With 'Free Agent Nation,' I was figuring out how to write a book along with writing the book... DAN PINK For my 2015 Book Reading Challenge resolution, the 1 (one) book I want to read is titled: "Write, yo... ROLF AND RANGER I don't just write hits for myself, or for other artists, or to just be writing it. I write it b... NAYVADIUS CASH The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but t... TEJU COLE Darling, You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I ... JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't ... SOPHIE KINSELLA I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope... PATRICIA MACLACHLAN Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about i... TOM PETERS When I really want to learn about something, I write a book on it. Then the real research begins, as... JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE You could write the best book in the world but if nobody knows about it, it is nothing BRANDON REECE TAYLOR Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his min... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not ... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, ... KAREN THOMPSON WALKER If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no dee... HARUKI MURAKAMI I had to make some order out of all this paper. That's why it took years to write this book. LOUISE BORDEN I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longe... SAMUEL BECKETT Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14... AVI If they want to write about me in a good way, they should write how I do things that are useful. BHUMIBOL ADULYADEJ Typically, a book takes me about a year to write. TED BELL I heard somewhere that whenever you write a book, people will ask you One Question about it over and... PATRICK DEWITT I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't bel... ARNOLD TOYNBEE I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for hims... A. A. MILNE If you cannot say what you have to say in 20 minutes, you should go away and write a book about it LORD BRABAZON Any idiot can write a long book. All it takes is patience and a willingness to keep pounding on the ... JASON SHEEHAN The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about som... GROUCHO MARX People very often say to me, 'How did you do it, how did you raise a baby and write a book?' And the... J.K. ROWLING The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try ... BERRY GORDY A lot of the music I write is about love. Sometimes I won't understand how I am feeling until I ... CAMILA CABELLO I think most people who write want to write, so that's what they do, ... I hope that this is a book ... LAURA EVANS Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going... JOAN JETT Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an ol... DAMON GALGUT While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excit... HAKAN NESSER I hate politics. I like to write about it, but to get involved in it, to try and make a lot of ignor... WILBUR SMITH I thought, well I can do that. I couldn't be bothered writing a book review, because I'd hav... EDDIE CAMPBELL The first book really was kind of an entertaining textbook for the homemaker. I couldn't find a ... MARTHA STEWART The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding scho... TUCKER CARLSON It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a m... MAYA ANGELOU To write a book about Mickey Mantle and not to show people who he really was doesn’t make any sens... PETER GOLENBOCK But even before that, in 1980 I went so far as to write a book about what had happened. And I wrote ... PATTY HEARST I write novels about women, except for one: 'Rococo', about a man, a New Jersey decorator. B... ADRIANA TRIGIANI
More Salman Rushdie
We are the storytelling animal. SALMAN RUSHDIE It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. SALMAN RUSHDIE What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a coun... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're offended, it's your problem. SALMAN RUSHDIE War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everyb... SALMAN RUSHDIE There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't pro... SALMAN RUSHDIE The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku K... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to b... SALMAN RUSHDIE When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away. SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. SALMAN RUSHDIE Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk abou... SALMAN RUSHDIE In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied ... SALMAN RUSHDIE A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be. SALMAN RUSHDIE So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in G... SALMAN RUSHDIE No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have... SALMAN RUSHDIE The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portra... SALMAN RUSHDIE The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not giv... SALMAN RUSHDIE Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive. SALMAN RUSHDIE Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; t... SALMAN RUSHDIE I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I ... SALMAN RUSHDIE I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the bes... SALMAN RUSHDIE The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fac... SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know. SALMAN RUSHDIE I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And... SALMAN RUSHDIE I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he... SALMAN RUSHDIE Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like s... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape t... SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ... SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. N... SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th... SALMAN RUSHDIE The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to acc... SALMAN RUSHDIE This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies... SALMAN RUSHDIE I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything do... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to fi... SALMAN RUSHDIE The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic visi... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the... SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear v... SALMAN RUSHDIE We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea t... SALMAN RUSHDIE In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, fro... SALMAN RUSHDIE Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. SALMAN RUSHDIE For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, e... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. SALMAN RUSHDIE Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God. SALMAN RUSHDIE Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. SALMAN RUSHDIE Realism can break a writer's heart. SALMAN RUSHDIE Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethi... SALMAN RUSHDIE ...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims o... SALMAN RUSHDIE Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts... SALMAN RUSHDIE I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. SALMAN RUSHDIE Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and En... SALMAN RUSHDIE Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in w... SALMAN RUSHDIE An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature... SALMAN RUSHDIE Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cle... SALMAN RUSHDIE British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. SALMAN RUSHDIE Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there... SALMAN RUSHDIE Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to crea... SALMAN RUSHDIE What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. SALMAN RUSHDIE faith without doubt is addiction SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again boun... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame. SALMAN RUSHDIE We all owe death a life. SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo... SALMAN RUSHDIE To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heav... SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever rea... SALMAN RUSHDIE A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape... SALMAN RUSHDIE What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to soci... SALMAN RUSHDIE When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you b... SALMAN RUSHDIE Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what. SALMAN RUSHDIE Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates... SALMAN RUSHDIE Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were se... SALMAN RUSHDIE Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true... SALMAN RUSHDIE My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write. SALMAN RUSHDIE Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is ... SALMAN RUSHDIE In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer ... SALMAN RUSHDIE If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. SALMAN RUSHDIE Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail. SALMAN RUSHDIE The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there prima... SALMAN RUSHDIE In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he w... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare o... SALMAN RUSHDIE The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an a... SALMAN RUSHDIE Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on. SALMAN RUSHDIE Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanat... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom becau... SALMAN RUSHDIE What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has decli... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world -... SALMAN RUSHDIE The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th c... SALMAN RUSHDIE At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British pow... SALMAN RUSHDIE Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoc... SALMAN RUSHDIE There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, ... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the A... SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a b... SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in ... SALMAN RUSHDIE But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goa... SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I wr... SALMAN RUSHDIE Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don&... SALMAN RUSHDIE Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternativ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word." [1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Me... SALMAN RUSHDIE Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power. SALMAN RUSHDIE From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. SALMAN RUSHDIE When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? Wh... SALMAN RUSHDIE Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. SALMAN RUSHDIE All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed a... SALMAN RUSHDIE American literature has always been immigrant. SALMAN RUSHDIE I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I... SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. SALMAN RUSHDIE I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the f... SALMAN RUSHDIE Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to de... SALMAN RUSHDIE This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildin... SALMAN RUSHDIE If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. SALMAN RUSHDIE A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in ret... SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives teach us who we are. SALMAN RUSHDIE Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that ex... SALMAN RUSHDIE How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape... SALMAN RUSHDIE What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second,... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance numbe... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness t... SALMAN RUSHDIE I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder. SALMAN RUSHDIE It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now und... SALMAN RUSHDIE Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside re... SALMAN RUSHDIE It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war... SALMAN RUSHDIE And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity o... SALMAN RUSHDIE As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn... SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist SALMAN RUSHDIE Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie... SALMAN RUSHDIE Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You'v... SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shap... SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, sha... SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously ... SALMAN RUSHDIE In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries ... SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ... SALMAN RUSHDIE What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characte... SALMAN RUSHDIE wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios. SALMAN RUSHDIE Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue, SALMAN RUSHDIE I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the f... SALMAN RUSHDIE The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up ac... SALMAN RUSHDIE I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinari... SALMAN RUSHDIE A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes!... SALMAN RUSHDIE In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to... SALMAN RUSHDIE When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy... SALMAN RUSHDIE The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the w... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to co... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what res... SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th... SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. SALMAN RUSHDIE Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom fr... SALMAN RUSHDIE I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. An... SALMAN RUSHDIE antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expres... SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ... SALMAN RUSHDIE At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak... SALMAN RUSHDIE There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught... SALMAN RUSHDIE I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same. SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it. SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to t... SALMAN RUSHDIE It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."<... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it wo... SALMAN RUSHDIE The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to... SALMAN RUSHDIE Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, w... SALMAN RUSHDIE When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other t... SALMAN RUSHDIE Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in... SALMAN RUSHDIE I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life. SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years.., SALMAN RUSHDIE Obviously, it is a very great honor and I'm very pleased to have it, and it's very nice to be recogn... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person th... SALMAN RUSHDIE Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to ou... SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it SALMAN RUSHDIE Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou... SALMAN RUSHDIE A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What ... SALMAN RUSHDIE What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. SALMAN RUSHDIE Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too. SALMAN RUSHDIE From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did t... SALMAN RUSHDIE The Satanic Verses. SALMAN RUSHDIE Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative... SALMAN RUSHDIE از همان زمان برمن روشن شد که خانواده بهطور ضمنی به اصل... SALMAN RUSHDIE