Salman Rushdie Quotes

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Salman Rushdie

Profession : Novelist

Birth : June 19, 1947

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Salman Rushdie

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

Salman Rushdie

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

Salman Rushdie

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Salman Rushdie

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

Salman Rushdie

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

Salman Rushdie

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Salman Rushdie

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

Salman Rushdie

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

Salman Rushdie

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

Salman Rushdie

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.

Salman Rushdie

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.

Salman Rushdie

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

Salman Rushdie

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.

Salman Rushdie

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

Salman Rushdie

Originality is dangerous.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'

Salman Rushdie