Salman Rushdie Quotes

Books have to teach their readers how to read them.

I knew a man whose thing it was to wreck the toilets in office buildings and write a slogan on the ruined walls: ‘If the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed.’ I’m beginning to understand how he felt.

[Charlton] Heston thinks America should arm its teachers; he seems to believe that schools would be safer if staff had the power to gun down children in their charge.

I know of very few great film-makers who might have been good novelists-Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, and that’s about it.

We are the lethal voyeurs.

To burn a book is not to destroy it. One minute of darkness will not make us blind.

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old-it is the new combinations that make them new.

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.