Quotes By Salman Rushdie

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

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

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 don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

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

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

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

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.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

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.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

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

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

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.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

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.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

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

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.