Salman Rushdie
We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
I will come back to India - so deal with it.
The world is always terrible.
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.
I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
If you're offended, it's your problem.
One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
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.
American literature has always been immigrant.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.