Salman Rushdie
There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.Collection: Running
When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.Collection: Christian
Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?Collection: Book
No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.Collection: Thinking
With death comes honesty.Collection: Death
Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.Collection: Mean
I grew up kissing books and bread.Collection: Book
Realism can break a writer's heart.Collection: Heart
All names mean something.Collection: Mean
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?Collection: Book
Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.Collection: Challenges
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.Collection: Stories
Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.Collection: Going Away
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.Collection: Belief
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.Collection: Dream
I was living in New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks. And I remember, you know, in those weeks that followed, when none of us spoke about anything else really, a number of friends of mine, people I knew, including very experienced journalists, I heard them saying things like, well, now we understand what happened to you.Collection: New York
Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.Collection: Inspirational
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.Collection: Talking
I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.Collection: Believe
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.Collection: World
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.Collection: Names
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.Collection: Real
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.Collection: Two
The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.Collection: Artist
Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.Collection: Home
So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).Collection: Home
Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.Collection: Hate
A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.Collection: Reality
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.Collection: Taken
To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.Collection: Crosses
The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously.Collection: Thinking
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.Collection: Thinking
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.Collection: Freedom
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.Collection: Thinking
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.Collection: Love
In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.Collection: Chocolate
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.Collection: Religious
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?Collection: Issues
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.Collection: Teaching
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.Collection: Stories
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.Collection: Years
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.Collection: Art
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.Collection: Honesty
We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.Collection: Islamic
In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.Collection: Dream
I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting.Collection: Thinking
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.Collection: Falling In Love
What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.Collection: Life
My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.Collection: Song