Quotes By Salman Rushdie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.