44 quotes
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Imaginary Homelands p. 391 (1992)
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion.
Imaginary Homelands (1992)
To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves.
Imaginary Homelands (1992)
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
In Good Faith (1990)
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
Imaginary Homelands (1992)
It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
What would a respectful political cartoon look like?
A rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
The Satanic Verses (1988)
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.
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.