Quotes from Salman Rushdie

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

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.

The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.

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.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

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.'

I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.

We are the storytelling animal.

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

Originality is dangerous.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.