A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Our lives teach us who we are.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
He graduated from King's College, Cambridge in England with honors.
He attended Rugby School in Warwickshire, England.
Rushdie married Indian model and actress Padma Lakshmi in 2004 but in June 2007 he announced that they were divorcing.
He is the author of the controversial book The Satanic Verses.
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