Quotes By Salman Rushdie

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Our lives teach us who we are.

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.

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

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

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.