1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

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.

If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.