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. – Salman Rushdie
This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, ‘infidels’, for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world. – Salman Rushdie
If you’re on a freeway and want to know if you’re being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice. – Salman Rushdie
When I’m writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call ‘supernaturalism.’ As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I’m writing about. – Salman Rushdie
I didn’t want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn’t want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage. – Salman Rushdie
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. – Salman Rushdie
The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. – Salman Rushdie
It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics. – Salman Rushdie
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. – Salman Rushdie
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again. – Salman Rushdie
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff. – Salman Rushdie
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. – Salman Rushdie
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day. – Salman Rushdie
In writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. – Salman Rushdie
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one. – Salman Rushdie
My first novel – the novel I wrote before ‘Midnight’s Children’ – feels, to me, now, very – I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I’m, you know, I’m happy for. – Salman Rushdie
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can’t face it head-on. – Salman Rushdie
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. – Salman Rushdie
The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone’s got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That’s a very big thing – the experience of not living where you started. – Salman Rushdie
I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character. – Salman Rushdie
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream. – Salman Rushdie
All my adult life, if I didn’t have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable. – Salman Rushdie
You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years. – Salman Rushdie
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. – Salman Rushdie
