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.
— Salman Rushdie
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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.
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.
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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.
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.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
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 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.
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.
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Our lives teach us who we are.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
