1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious. ‘How did you come up with the idea of me,’ he demanded, ‘who asked you to do that?’ and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race. The.

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

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve.

Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.

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

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.

Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don’t respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don’t censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

Children like being a little scared, but they don’t want to be disturbed.