Salman Rushdie Quotes: 12

• 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.

• I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.

• From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

  The Satanic Verses

• When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]

• A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

• Realism can break a writer's heart.

  Shame

• ‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

  Midnight's Children

• So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.The problem’s name is God.

  The Satanic Verses

• Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

• A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

• If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

• A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

  The Satanic Verses