Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

- Salman Rushdie

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

- Salman Rushdie

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

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

- Salman Rushdie

We all owe death a life.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Faith without doubt is addiction

- Salman Rushdie

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

How do you defeat terrorism? Dont be terrorized.

- Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002, Salman Rushdie

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Realism can break a writer's heart.

- Shame, Salman Rushdie

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

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

- Salman Rushdie

&lrmNo people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

So Indias problem turns out to be the worlds problem. What happened in India has happened in Gods name. The problems name is God.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

What can't be cured must be endured.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

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

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

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

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

Reality is a question of perspective the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

- The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

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

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

- Salman Rushdie

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

- Fury, Salman Rushdie

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

- The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

- Salman Rushdie

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

- Salman Rushdie

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

- Salman Rushdie

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

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

- The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet 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, Salman Rushdie

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.

- Salman Rushdie

What you were is forever who you are.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

- Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Salman Rushdie

A book is not completed till it's read.

- Salman Rushdie

For every snake, there is a ladder for every ladder,a snake

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

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: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Salman Rushdie

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

- The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie

My heart broke open and history fell in.

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

Optimism is a disease

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

- Salman Rushdie

Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

- Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

- The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

- Shame, Salman Rushdie

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

- Shame, Salman Rushdie

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

- Salman Rushdie

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

- Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

- The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Peace broke out.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

- The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

- Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Salman Rushdie

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

- Salman Rushdie

What grows best in the heat: fantasy unreason lust.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

- The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

- Salman Rushdie

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

- Salman Rushdie

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures at other times, that we fall between two stools.

- Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Salman Rushdie

All names mean something.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

- Luka and the Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie

I have been a swallower of lives and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

- Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

- Salman Rushdie

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

- Salman Rushdie

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

A figure of speech is a shifty thing it can be twisted or it can be straight.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.

- Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Everything is relative, one mans absolute belief is another mans fairy tale

- Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

- The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Our lives teach us who we are.

- Salman Rushdie

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

- Salman Rushdie

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.

- Salman Rushdie

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

- Salman Rushdie

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

- Salman Rushdie