An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.Salman Rushdie
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.Salman Rushdie
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.Salman Rushdie
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.Salman Rushdie
The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.Salman Rushdie
The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.Salman Rushdie
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.Salman Rushdie
When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.Salman Rushdie
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.Salman Rushdie
