Quotes By Salman Rushdie

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Our lives teach us who we are.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

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.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.

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

It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

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