Salman Rushdie

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

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

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Our lives teach us who we are.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

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

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

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

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

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.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.