Salman Rushdie
I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.Collection: Country
This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.Collection: Book
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.Collection: Writing
If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.Collection: Writing
I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.Collection: Revenge
In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.Collection: People
In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.Collection: Art
Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.Collection: Flying
I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.Collection: Children
I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.Collection: Thinking
Is birth always a fall?Collection: Fall
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.Collection: Eye
As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.Collection: Religious
There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.Collection: Peaceful
Hell is other people's fantasies.Collection: People
I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.Collection: Father
I know who I am, I know what I'm for, and I know what I'm willing to fight for.Collection: Fighting
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.Collection: Art
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.Collection: Voice
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.Collection: Stories
Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.Collection: Long
When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.Collection: Taken
I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)Collection: Want
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.Collection: Children
Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses.Collection: Motivational
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.Collection: Opposites
After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.Collection: War
Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.Collection: Believe
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.Collection: Dream
You don't just - you often have to defend the freedoms of people you don't like, you know, whose work you don't like, because freedom of speech is not just for serious people. It's also for trashy people. So, and, unfortunately, this is at the trashy end of the scale.Collection: People
And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?Collection: Strong
Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.Collection: Thinking
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.Collection: Strong
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.Collection: Eye
Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.Collection: Long
Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.Collection: Cheer
A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.Collection: Book
It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.Collection: Artist
You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.Collection: Smart
Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.Collection: Life Is
Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.Collection: Book
And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.Collection: Book
So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.Collection: Special
I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.Collection: Football
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.Collection: Writing
Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.Collection: People
In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.Collection: Believe
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.Collection: Heart
People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.Collection: Kings