I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
It’s so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they’re always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
I grew up reading ‘The Jungle Books’ and loving them.
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world – ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Lolita,’ the ‘Arabian Nights.’
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it’s an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
The frustrating part of being tagged ‘controversial’ is people go looking for trouble where there isn’t any to look for.
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Matthew Wiener on ‘Mad Men’ writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
My first novel – the novel I wrote before ‘Midnight’s Children’ – feels, to me, now, very – I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I’m, you know, I’m happy for.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
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.
Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, ‘anti-American,’ and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian ‘terrorism.’
People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.