"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
— Salman Rushdie

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

"To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?"
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"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. "
— Salman Rushdie

"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."
— Salman Rushdie

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners."
— Salman Rushdie

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"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."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

-- From "The Shelter of the World"
— Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

"I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)"
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"faith without doubt is addiction"
— Salman Rushdie

"Such were the factors that detached Ormus Cama from the ordinary ties of family life. The ties that strangle us, which we call love. Because of the loosening of these ties he became, with all the attendant pain of such becoming, free.
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must forever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?"
— Salman Rushdie

"So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.
Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through.
We are the humbugs now."
— Salman Rushdie (Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002)

"Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained."
— Salman Rushdie

"There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives..."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
— Salman Rushdie

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power."
— Salman Rushdie

"Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one.

"The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.)"
— Salman Rushdie

"Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin."
— Salman Rushdie

""Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.""
— Salman Rushdie

"A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. "
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can."
— Salman Rushdie (The Moor's Last Sigh)

"'The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.'"
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."
— Salman Rushdie

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"We crave permission openly to become our secret selves."
— Salman Rushdie (The Moor's Last Sigh)

"Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through until it reaches the heart? Or worse, can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Alicia, who's first response on hearing of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother, who stone-faced beneath a broad-brimmed black hat said only, "You have inherited his lack of restraint my dear."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write."
— Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

""Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves."
"
— Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

"Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path."
— Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

"What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?"
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"'A poet's work...To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.'"
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape."
— Salman Rushdie (Shame)

"Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it."
— Salman Rushdie

"A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in
which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what
being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's
quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies
designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs,
those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay."
— Salman Rushdie (Fury)

"Life has vanquished death and even the furniture celebrates."
— Salman Rushdie

"She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!"
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart."
— Salman Rushdie (The Moor's Last Sigh)

"...the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race..."
— Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown: A Novel)