Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

His twenty-seven seconds of fame were over. He was nobody again.

You allow people to do what they will with your body—to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness—so that you can live.

Some of them love it, some don’t, and that’s the ordinary life of a book.

I’ll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

To accept that this is how it’s going to be for the rest of my life…it’s depressing. But, as Saleem Sinai’s parents repeatedly told him during his childhood in Midnight’s Children (and as mine told me), “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.

I have no issue with religion when it occupies this private space and doesn’t seek to impose its values on others. But when religion becomes politicized, even weaponized, then it’s everybody’s business, because of its capacity for harm.

if we could simply make the distinction between private religious faith and public, politicized ideology, it would be easier to see things as they are and to speak out without worrying about offended sensibilities.