Salman Rushdie Quotes

I don't know where everything is going, but I'm pretty confident that people like books - the objects. So I'm going to go on that -they're not going to disappear.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.

My mother was a huge, huge reader. I think I picked up very early how precious it was to write things in books and have people like my mother glued to the page.

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

Whenever there's an opportunity to celebrate the written word and celebrate the folks that read the written word, and, I think, to encourage other writers to write and encourage folks to read more and get connected to it in a personal way, it's a positive thing.

I knew I loved writing, and I was raised by people who love books.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.