Quotes By Salman Rushdie

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

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.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

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

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

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.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

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

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

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.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

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

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

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

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.