1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

For the record, there is a French project to make a theatrical adaptation of The Satanic Verses, so maybe that's a start.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

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.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.

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.

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.