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

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
Salman Rushdie

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Salman Rushdie

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Salman Rushdie


If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Salman Rushdie

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie

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.
Salman Rushdie

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Salman Rushdie

Our lives teach us who we are.
Salman Rushdie

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
Salman Rushdie

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Salman Rushdie