Salman Rushdie Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“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.”

“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.”

“What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.”

“It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”

“If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.”

“Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.”

“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.”

“What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.”

“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 of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.”

“Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.”