I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI didn’t become a writer to write about me.
SALMAN RUSHDIEThe world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWhen 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 RUSHDIEOnly 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 RUSHDIEWe 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 RUSHDIEWe cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWhat 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 RUSHDIEWhat one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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 RUSHDIEI think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
SALMAN RUSHDIEUntil you know who you are you can’t write.
SALMAN RUSHDIEMasks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIESomething was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWhat’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIt matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEBut 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