Salman Rushdie quotes

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. (Salman Rushdie)
Our lives teach us who we are.
Salman Rushdie
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Salman Rushdie
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Salman Rushdie
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
What can't be cured must be endured.
Salman Rushdie
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame. (Salman Rushdie)
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Salman Rushdie
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
Salman Rushdie
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Salman Rushdie
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
Salman Rushdie
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie
What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish? (Salman Rushdie)
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. 'This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. '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.
Salman Rushdie
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Salman Rushdie
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
Salman Rushdie