Salman Rushdie

The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.

Reality is a question of perspective.

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

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

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.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

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

Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

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.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

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.

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.