Salman Rushdie
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Our lives teach us who we are.
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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.
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.
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.
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
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.
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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 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.
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.
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.
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
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.
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
The world is a very abnormal place.
I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
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.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.