Quotes By Salman Rushdie

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.

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.

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.

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.