Quotes by Salman Rushdie

• One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
• 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.
• Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
• Our lives teach us who we are.
• 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.
• 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.
• Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
• Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
• When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
• 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.
• 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.
• I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
• 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.
• Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
• It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
• A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
• Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
• Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
• In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips
• In the cookie of life, friendship is the chocolate chips.
• In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.