Quotes from Salman Rushdie

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

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.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

But 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.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow the world.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.