Until you know who you are you can’t write.
SALMAN RUSHDIETwo 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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.
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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
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If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
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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.
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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.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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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.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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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.
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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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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.
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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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.
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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