Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Después de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdicción en lo concerniente a mi salud.” — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
