110+ Salman Rushdie Quotes On Writing, Free Speech And Freedom

Salman Rushdie is an Indian novelist, essayist, and public intellectual. He is best known for his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, which was the subject of a 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Rushdie's work is marked by a rich use of magical realism and an irreverent wit, and has won numerous awards, including the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight's Children. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Salman Rushdie on writing, free speech, life.

Top 10 Salman Rushdie Quotes

1. There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.
2. Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
3. One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
4. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
5. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
6. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
7. The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
8. In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
9. No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
10. The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Salman Rushdie Short Quotes

• When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
• Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
• Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
• Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
• Reality is a question of perspective.
• We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
• Good advice is rarer than rubies.
• I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
• A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.
• Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Writing

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

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions. — Salman Rushdie

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. — Salman Rushdie

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you. — Salman Rushdie

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. — Salman Rushdie

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. — Salman Rushdie

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive. — Salman Rushdie

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back. — Salman Rushdie

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Free Speech

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

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting. — Salman Rushdie

Free speech is life itself. — Salman Rushdie

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly. — Salman Rushdie

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work. — Salman Rushdie

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible. — Salman Rushdie

Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Life

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. — Salman Rushdie

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life. — Salman Rushdie

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day. — Salman Rushdie

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. — Salman Rushdie

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world. — Salman Rushdie

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life. — Salman Rushdie

I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream. — Salman Rushdie

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

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story. — Salman Rushdie

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Love

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

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song. — Salman Rushdie

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

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." — Salman Rushdie

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh? — Salman Rushdie

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it... they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. — Salman Rushdie

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love. — Salman Rushdie

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith. — Salman Rushdie

I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry. — Salman Rushdie

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love? — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Freedom

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. — 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

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

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions. — Salman Rushdie

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream. — Salman Rushdie

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. — Salman Rushdie

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too. — Salman Rushdie

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human. — Salman Rushdie

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war. — Salman Rushdie

We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Magical

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real. — Salman Rushdie

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real. — Salman Rushdie

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents. — Salman Rushdie

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Satirical

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

‘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

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Imaginative

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

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. — Salman Rushdie

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth. — Salman Rushdie

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind. — Salman Rushdie

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world. — Salman Rushdie

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

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world. — Salman Rushdie

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. — Salman Rushdie

The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. — Salman Rushdie

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About World

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

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 mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. — Salman Rushdie

Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within. — Salman Rushdie

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' — Salman Rushdie

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation. — Salman Rushdie

What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked. — Salman Rushdie

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Authors

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both. — Salman Rushdie

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

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Books

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live. — Salman Rushdie

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line. — Salman Rushdie

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected. — Salman Rushdie

The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out. — Salman Rushdie

And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed. — Salman Rushdie

You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end. — Salman Rushdie

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes About Literature

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born. — Salman Rushdie

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. — Salman Rushdie

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature. — Salman Rushdie

American literature has always been immigrant. — Salman Rushdie

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again. — Salman Rushdie

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously. — Salman Rushdie

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given. — Salman Rushdie

For me, what I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage. — Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Famous Quotes And Sayings

In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world. — Salman Rushdie

I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too. — Salman Rushdie

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind. — Salman Rushdie

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. — Salman Rushdie

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. — Salman Rushdie

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other. — Salman Rushdie

It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had. — Salman Rushdie

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust. — Salman Rushdie

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

We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us. — Salman Rushdie

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature. — Salman Rushdie

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated. — Salman Rushdie

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs. — Salman Rushdie

Our lives teach us who we are. — Salman Rushdie

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. — Salman Rushdie

Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere. — Salman Rushdie

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters. — Salman Rushdie

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups. — Salman Rushdie

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. — Salman Rushdie

Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people. — Salman Rushdie

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. — Salman Rushdie

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. — Salman Rushdie

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

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what. — Salman Rushdie

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family. — Salman Rushdie

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame. — Salman Rushdie

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile. — Salman Rushdie

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

And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel? — Salman Rushdie

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for? — Salman Rushdie

If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase. — Salman Rushdie

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin. — Salman Rushdie

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. — Salman Rushdie

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

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. — 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

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated. — Salman Rushdie

If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel. — Salman Rushdie

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. — Salman Rushdie

I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. — Salman Rushdie

I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny. — Salman Rushdie

You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, "How do you face up to violence?" And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground. — Salman Rushdie

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too. — Salman Rushdie

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. — Salman Rushdie

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini. — Salman Rushdie

Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses. — Salman Rushdie

[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...] — Salman Rushdie

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks. — Salman Rushdie

I know who I am, I know what I'm for, and I know what I'm willing to fight for. — Salman Rushdie

...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections. — Salman Rushdie

The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for. — Salman Rushdie

So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses. — Salman Rushdie

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black. — Salman Rushdie

Life Lessons by Salman Rushdie

1. Salman Rushdie teaches us to never give up in the face of adversity, and to stand up for our beliefs no matter the cost.
2. He also reminds us to be open-minded and tolerant of others, even when we disagree with them.
3. Finally, he encourages us to embrace our unique identities and use our creativity to make the world a better place.