Quote

I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.

Salman Rushdie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Dictated
Dictate
Either
Anyone
Believe

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
Image
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Salman Rushdie
Image
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?
Salman Rushdie
Image
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
Salman Rushdie
Image
He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.
Salman Rushdie
Image
For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
Salman Rushdie
Image
I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie