1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You’re all Muslim, so now you’re a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: ‘Oh no, we’re not.’

I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character.

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it’s just to annoy you.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: ‘We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.’

Keep away from her,” said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life.

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

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world – ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Lolita,’ the ‘Arabian Nights.’

The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle – to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can’t be both things.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.