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 RUSHDIEYou 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 RUSHDIEFaith without doubt is addiction.
SALMAN RUSHDIEOf course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
SALMAN RUSHDIEMasks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIEFriendships 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 RUSHDIEIf somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI 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.
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIENo, 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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEYou can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIt is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEThe world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIn the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI 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 RUSHDIEWe all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE