The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. - Salman Rushdie
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle. - Salman Rushdie
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too. - Salman Rushdie
A book is not completed till it's read. - Salman Rushdie
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless. - Salman Rushdie
History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it. - Salman Rushdie
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk. - Salman Rushdie
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it. - Salman Rushdie
Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths - Salman Rushdie
for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy. - Salman Rushdie
Non mi piacciono i matrimoni combinati. Ci sono sbagli dei quali non bisognerebbe mai poter incolpare i propri poveri genitori. - Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. - Salman Rushdie
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. - Salman Rushdie
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country."[Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms (The Times of India, January 16, 2008)] - Salman Rushdie
If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too. - Salman Rushdie
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey. - Salman Rushdie
Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves. - Salman Rushdie
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. - Salman Rushdie
Until you know who you are you can’t write. - Salman Rushdie
Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy. - Salman Rushdie
Our lives teach us who we are. - Salman Rushdie
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment. - Salman Rushdie
Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims. - Salman Rushdie
I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents. - Salman Rushdie
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return. - Salman Rushdie
Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead. - Salman Rushdie
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods. - Salman Rushdie
Cuidado con el hombre de acción que por fin desea progresar por medio del pensamiento. Un poco de pensamiento es algo peligroso. - Salman Rushdie
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence. - Salman Rushdie
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. - Salman Rushdie
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. - Salman Rushdie
The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen. - Salman Rushdie
Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.) - Salman Rushdie
...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. - Salman Rushdie
Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word."[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)] - Salman Rushdie
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black. - Salman Rushdie