1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

Free speech is life itself.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person the author is trying to suggest that all people are like this. The novel is the art of the particular. And I'm talking about a particular person whose development from innocence to guilt, if you like, is his own particular narrative arc. The point is to make that coherent - not to read the book as some kind of simple allegory, but to read it as a story about a person.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.

Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.

Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles.