Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
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Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
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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.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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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.
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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
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I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
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Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
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Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.
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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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The world is always terrible.
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American literature has always been immigrant.
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I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'
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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.