“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.”
— Salman Rushdie
“One of the things I’ve learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I’ve got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.”
“The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.”
“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”
“Why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?”
“The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.”
“One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.”
“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”
“The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.”
“My heart broke open and history fell in.”
“Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.”
“So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that – while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.”
“Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.”
“Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.”
“Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”
“I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”
“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.”
“Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.”
“Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.”
“I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.”
“When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.”
“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...”
“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”
“We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.”
“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”
“The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.”
“If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.”
“We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.”
“Cruelty is not a literary value.”
“There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.”
“The only privilege literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist – is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.”
“I’m not a very big fan of ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ I think it’s visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.”
“I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made ‘Twilight’ look like ‘War and Peace.’”
“Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
“Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.”
“Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.”
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,’ but the moment you threaten violence in return, you’ve taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.”
“We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.”
“What you were is forever who you are.”
“The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.”
“Realism can break a writer’s heart.”
“If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now.”
“I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.”
“I saw Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained,’ and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don’t like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino’s violence is actually funny.”
“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
“To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.”
“One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.”
“Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I’m not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.”
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