FastSaying

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.


Salman Rushdie

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SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what res...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom fr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. An...
SALMAN RUSHDIE antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expres...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."<...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it wo...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
SALMAN RUSHDIE Obviously, it is a very great honor and I'm very pleased to have it, and it's very nice to be recogn...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to ou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it
SALMAN RUSHDIE Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
SALMAN RUSHDIE From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The Satanic Verses.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative...
SALMAN RUSHDIE